Getting To Know More About...Dave Holloway
On the second episode of the video series we speak to Dave Holloway who is not only a branding agency owner he is also the author of Wonder Leads.
Dave initially started to write down his thoughts and experiences of trying to make video work as a lead generation tool. These initial notes and ideas then became his first book release.
How do you find time to run an agency and also write a book?
Covid presented a lot of challenges for many businesses and most certainly ours was one that had more than its fair share. When lockdown happened the reality was that most of our agency work significantly reduced because many of our clients had their workers on furlough. Projects that were in the pipeline was suddenly shelved indefinitely so we were always looking for ways to try and enhance our product offering. It was actually just prior to the lockdown in November 2019 I actually started writing the book and it didn't start out as being a book it was kind of like I was getting my thoughts down on paper, maybe something around some training, and it just sort of evolved overtime. Then when lockdown hit it gave me the opportunity to refocus my attention whilst the agency work died down. We then went full bore on the book and concentrated getting that over the line.
What was the inspiration for the book?
I have run BML since 2007 which is my branding agency and pretty much my biggest headache throughout that time, even though it's a marketing agency, is outbound sales. I always knew exactly the right people I wanted to speak to but the problem was trying to find ways to open those conversations in the right way. I find it really difficult to engage in activities where I know that the other person is going to be unreceptive. So things like cold calling, for example, where they're quite invasive and generally unwelcome are my worst nightmare. As a small business when resources are generally in short supply and it's difficult to engage in other activities like those traditionally associated with kind of cold and direct mail can be very expensive and very difficult to track results.
I was kind of in the hunt to try and find a solution to all of those problems. How do you approach the people that you want to work with without sacrificing your time, your money and your integrity?
Then I sort of came across some techniques involving personalised video messaging, which now are documented and refined in the book, as a way to help other people overcome the challenges I had for over a decade.
How do you embark on the journey of actually starting to create videos to try and facilitate leads for your business?
The absolute number one thing that you need to do if you're going to adopt this approach where you are sending individually personalised messages to people is focus on who you're going to be sending to. There is no point in adopting the blanket approach that most marketers go for where they will happily put together some generic campaign and fire it off to as many people as possible in the hope that one or two leads are going to come from it. The approach is about being permission based so that focuses on using it with people who are first degree connections on social media particularly on LinkedIn. It's about trying to make sure that you are targeting people who will see the most value in what your businesses does this is where a lot of business struggle with this concept.
How important is it to look good and sound good when recording videos?
It's absolutely fundamental to achieve the highest level production that you can within reason. The main thing I would like to point out for doing this is not just to make things look pretty for the sake of it you're enhancing two things. One is the perception of value in your business this kind of goes back to the fundamentals of what branding is all about. If you think about the highest luxury brands why are they established and why do you think they're expensive? it's all in the way that it's presented, and it's that visual difference of how different things look and why one thing looks like more quality and more efforts has been spent on it compared to another. That gives us, no matter whether you've got any design training or not, an instant association with a business that has value to it.
That value will either be high or it will be low depending on how well the perception of value that's being given off by the way that it's presented. Secondly my advice to any business would be if you want to use video in lead generation activity or marketing of any kind, if you want to increase your chances of having a profitable conversation then be consistent. Every time that you communicate with that person you present at the highest level that you possibly can, then that person's perception is going to be that they're dealing with a high value business.
There is lots more content in the full version of the interview here
You can find out more about the Wonder Leads book here
Dave initially started to write down his thoughts and experiences of trying to make video work as a lead generation tool. These initial notes and ideas then became his first book release.
How do you find time to run an agency and also write a book?
Covid presented a lot of challenges for many businesses and most certainly ours was one that had more than its fair share. When lockdown happened the reality was that most of our agency work significantly reduced because many of our clients had their workers on furlough. Projects that were in the pipeline was suddenly shelved indefinitely so we were always looking for ways to try and enhance our product offering. It was actually just prior to the lockdown in November 2019 I actually started writing the book and it didn't start out as being a book it was kind of like I was getting my thoughts down on paper, maybe something around some training, and it just sort of evolved overtime. Then when lockdown hit it gave me the opportunity to refocus my attention whilst the agency work died down. We then went full bore on the book and concentrated getting that over the line.
What was the inspiration for the book?
I have run BML since 2007 which is my branding agency and pretty much my biggest headache throughout that time, even though it's a marketing agency, is outbound sales. I always knew exactly the right people I wanted to speak to but the problem was trying to find ways to open those conversations in the right way. I find it really difficult to engage in activities where I know that the other person is going to be unreceptive. So things like cold calling, for example, where they're quite invasive and generally unwelcome are my worst nightmare. As a small business when resources are generally in short supply and it's difficult to engage in other activities like those traditionally associated with kind of cold and direct mail can be very expensive and very difficult to track results.
I was kind of in the hunt to try and find a solution to all of those problems. How do you approach the people that you want to work with without sacrificing your time, your money and your integrity?
Then I sort of came across some techniques involving personalised video messaging, which now are documented and refined in the book, as a way to help other people overcome the challenges I had for over a decade.
How do you embark on the journey of actually starting to create videos to try and facilitate leads for your business?
The absolute number one thing that you need to do if you're going to adopt this approach where you are sending individually personalised messages to people is focus on who you're going to be sending to. There is no point in adopting the blanket approach that most marketers go for where they will happily put together some generic campaign and fire it off to as many people as possible in the hope that one or two leads are going to come from it. The approach is about being permission based so that focuses on using it with people who are first degree connections on social media particularly on LinkedIn. It's about trying to make sure that you are targeting people who will see the most value in what your businesses does this is where a lot of business struggle with this concept.
How important is it to look good and sound good when recording videos?
It's absolutely fundamental to achieve the highest level production that you can within reason. The main thing I would like to point out for doing this is not just to make things look pretty for the sake of it you're enhancing two things. One is the perception of value in your business this kind of goes back to the fundamentals of what branding is all about. If you think about the highest luxury brands why are they established and why do you think they're expensive? it's all in the way that it's presented, and it's that visual difference of how different things look and why one thing looks like more quality and more efforts has been spent on it compared to another. That gives us, no matter whether you've got any design training or not, an instant association with a business that has value to it.
That value will either be high or it will be low depending on how well the perception of value that's being given off by the way that it's presented. Secondly my advice to any business would be if you want to use video in lead generation activity or marketing of any kind, if you want to increase your chances of having a profitable conversation then be consistent. Every time that you communicate with that person you present at the highest level that you possibly can, then that person's perception is going to be that they're dealing with a high value business.
There is lots more content in the full version of the interview here
You can find out more about the Wonder Leads book here