Shaun Raines, CEO and Founder, of Hired Guns Agency, joined Jeff and Alex for an episode of Refresh Friday where they discussed the ins and outs of podcasting. This experienced team of podcasters shared insights on how to transform your office, whether at home or work, into a podcast studio without splurging on high-end gear. Shaun shared his own trials and successes regarding equipment, revealing how a simple lighting setup and a decent microphone can elevate your content from amateur to professional. Plus, we tackled post-production revolutionized by AI, as platforms like Descript and Riverside become the unsung heroes of podcasting adventures.
Podcasting is a powerful marketing tool and should likely be a primary anchor for your companies content strategy. Enjoy this episode.
Shaun Raines, CEO and Founder, of Hired Guns Agency, joined Jeff and Alex for an episode of Refresh Friday where they discussed the ins and outs of podcasting. This experienced team of podcasters shared insights on how to transform your office, whether at home or work, into a podcast studio without splurging on high-end gear. Shaun shared his own trials and successes regarding equipment, revealing how a simple lighting setup and a decent microphone can elevate your content from amateur to professional. Plus, we tackled post-production revolutionized by AI, as platforms like Descript and Riverside become the unsung heroes of podcasting adventures.
Podcasting is a powerful marketing tool and should likely be a primary anchor for your companies content strategy. Enjoy this episode.
So we're running a I guess you could call it a big cast right now, and I know that there's a number of people who ask us from time to time you know what software are you using, what mics are you using, how did you get started that kind of thing? And after we were talking with you, Sean, and knowing what you're doing now, I figured this would be a good time to talk about all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm glad you guys wanted to talk about it. I thought we would end up talking a little bit about marketing and maybe some comparisons to B2C and B2B and maybe we'll have a little bit of that dialogue as well. But yeah, on the podcasting, you guys are, I think, very familiar with the topic and there's a lot of different platforms and sometimes people put together shows Like this is more of a show to me than a podcast, show to me, then a podcast. But I got interested in it a long time ago During COVID. I decided, okay, well, I've got a little more time on my hands, so let me figure it out. And that's when I started to do research. But I really didn't actually put together or launch my first episode until March of 2020 was the first episode I did of what's going on with Sean, which again was just kind of my own, exercising my ability to figure out you know, if I can, yeah, yep.
Speaker 2:So what's going on with Sean was kind of my idea of I want to be able to have conversations with people where everyone's kind of locked down. I want to. I think aaron bickert was my first guest, that's a good and I, yeah, and I just so.
Speaker 2:I just kind of did a smattering of old friends, uh, industry friends, and I I think the tagline still for what's going on with Sean, which still exists I just don't put as much time into episodes there because it's just other things that unlocked from all of that over the last few years but what's going on with Sean says it's a podcast grounded in marketing but with an appetite for things that, talking about things that make life worth living.
Speaker 2:And that's just kind of that's my personality, because of course I love to talk about all the marketing stuff, but some people like to go beyond that. Some people like to get outside of our vertical and what I call not a motive, and then all of a sudden you're having dialogue about things that maybe were things going on in the world. I love to talk about music with people. I'm a real big music guy, both playing it, listening to it. So that was the inspiration for really kind of figuring out I wanted to reconnect with people and then I learned a lot about the whole kind of podcasting thing and now it's kind of basically turn it into the business that I operate now, but with a little bit of a twist.
Speaker 3:I can tell you have a nice mic.
Speaker 2:You know what's funny about microphones? Well, it's not funny. It might be interesting to people. You can spend thousands of dollars on a microphone, as you guys know. You can also spend 50 bucks and it'll sound about 250 times better than just using your AirPods or the microphone that might be built into your webcam. We get that question a lot from people when they're saying, well, what kind of camera should I use, or what kind of webcam? We oftentimes just tell people get it a 1080p or one that will be as good as 4K. Logitech Brio that's the camera I'm using right now is a Logitech Brio. I think you can buy it for $150.
Speaker 3:Is that what I'm using?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but when it comes to microphones the one that I'm using right now I think I first bought it when it came onto the market. It was less than a hundred dollars. You can buy it now they, I think, for 60 or 70 dollars. And yet there are some people, and I think it's just um, in our industry it seems there are a lot of people drowning in, like me, and so the vanity piece of if that's kind of who you are, great, but it'll typically mean that's easy to to peg that you're one of those people because you'll buy the $2,000 microphone when you only needed a $200 microphone. So I just try to assess what you're trying to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you don't need the Rogan setup, at least not for the way that we advocate podcasting. There's a difference between, obviously, entertainment podcasts and using it as a marketing tool. Right, there's a big, big difference. Most companies are well, no company is going to amass a listening audience and or viewing audience if you're also video podcasting audience and or viewing audience if you're also video podcasting. They're not going to amass an audience like, uh, smartless, or you know, joe rogan experience or really all the top podcasts that are meant to be, um, informational. But that doesn't mean that there isn't tremendous value in podcasting, which is, you know, we'll talk about all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So there's some. There's some good, successful automotive ones um like car dealership guys doing a great one um this interbased one is good. Uh, brian pash's was decent for a little while there. I'm not sure he's doing it so much anymore.
Speaker 2:Um, or it's not yeah, that, and there are different schools of thought on consistency or frequency Like, should you be and I always try to tell people one just get your head around the idea of what a wellspring it becomes for content creation, which I know we'll explore that a little bit in our conversation today. But I also want people not to try to bite off more than they can chew. Want people not to try to bite off more than they can chew. Brian is a great example of somebody who's he has so many things going on managing his kind of business portfolio that I can only imagine that's very difficult now to find time for the podcast and then also just to align it and prioritize it among all the other parts of his business that he operates live events and there's just a lot to manage. So I always want people to understand the frequency, how often you're going to record episodes.
Speaker 2:It is important, but you don't want to start by thinking we need a weekly show. You can't all of a sudden we're going to do what Alex and Jeff are doing. We're going to have a weekly show. You guys know better than most people in the industry that it's uh. It takes time to prepare for that, whether especially if you're doing interview style shows like this. A lot of the automotive podcasts that have been out for a long time are primarily interview shows. That's where you probably are going to derive the most value uh, for target audience, um, but yeah it. But yeah. It certainly is one thing I tell people. Just make sure that you're seeing the value of it and the purpose of podcasting before you start to think you're going to easily pull it off in terms of once a week. If you can start off with once a month, that's where I usually tell people to start with once a month and then figure out how you build it into your work schedule. And more frequency comes later, yeah.
Speaker 1:Your point there, jeff. Like we, it took us a long time to really figure, not the formula, but, um, like we have got, we usually take a like in a couple of days every quarter, uh, depending on on what kind of interest and whatnot, and we try to schedule out as far as we can that time. Um, you know, there's sponsor shows and things like that that do do help out. That's probably the hardest part is the scheduling. Let's say that's.
Speaker 3:Yeah, getting everybody on board, yeah, yeah, we've been pretty lucky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then people last minute have to bail that happens. People last minute have to bail, that happens. We're able to pull someone in last minute. There have been some good people for helping out on that regard, like Drew Ament, for example. He says keep me on the sideline, call me at the last minute if you ever need. And then there's also the promotional pieces of it. It's like an email, um. And then there's social posts. We've been fortunate to find a software that allows the simulcasting and also the scheduling across LinkedIn, youtube and Facebook, but we didn't have that for a long time. Yeah, what do we use? We use Ecamm now Ecamm.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because they do the broadcasting to all the different places.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're on it right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, before we used Zoom for a long time that had a and that was very expensive because you had to pay on top of your regular Zoom licenses and we never really used that feature, where with the webinar in Zoom, you can like host 200 people or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, when you're doing the live webinar, it's a little bit of a different dynamic because the podcasting, especially the video capture podcasting platforms that have risen up over the last few years I don't know if there's one that actually that's a true for podcasting versus webinar that it would allow 200 seats. They're usually capped at a much smaller number than that. But when I first started the what's Going On With Sean podcasting, which is my kind of learning area, well, how are people I mean you guys know this. You have to figure out. Well, how do we handle distribution? How do you get your podcast into Apple? How do we? How do we handle distribution like, how do you, how do you get your podcast into apple? How do you get your podcast into spotify and uh? So that was one of my first questions uh, beyond, just well, what kind of gear do I need? But the distribution and I used zoom in the the first. I don't know how many episodes. I think I did almost 25 in 2020.
Speaker 2:When I started what's Going On With Sean, I think I did 24, 25 episodes and it nearly killed me to do that many episodes. It was fun to do, but that was a really particularly awful year in my life, and so I used it also as a thing to just take my mind off of all of the tremendous sadness that I was experiencing. That was the year I lost my mom, so it was complicated for a lot of reasons, but Zoom was the easiest thing because so many people were familiar with it from being on web calls, typically regarding their employment, and my research, though, took me to other places. I started using and I still use this Descript a little bit.
Speaker 2:Riverside is another popular platform. We use Riverside still a lot, and all of them are still growing because most of them all have AI components built in. So, descript, riverside, transistor all of them have at least some measure of ai built in, which will make it will cut down the amount of time that you have to spend in post auto, post audio editing, post video editing, depending on the type of show you have. So you know riverside, for example. That's one of the things that first caught my attention with them is, regardless of the camera and the microphone that your guests have or you yourself have, it will use its AI to optimize the best quality in terms of look from the camera and the sound from the microphone.
Speaker 2:And then you have distribution platforms like Transistor and Buzzsprout, both of whom actually don't know if Transistor has this now, but Buzzsprout, for example, started adding things like magic mastering, like that. Most people aren't audio engineers either, so the fact that these tools have made all of that even easier. You can come out with a very good looking, great looking and great sounding product just because the technology has advanced so far. And I know a lot of people still use Zoom, but I think Zoom probably missed out on that opportunity to stay really prolific in that space, because they serve a much bigger audience. It's not just that podcast audience. There's, of course, much, much bigger Yep.
Speaker 1:The other thing. So if you're doing a video one, and you were mentioning the camera and the mic at the beginning, I've seen some people come on and might have missed that part where you don't have to spend a ton of money on the camera or the mic at the beginning. I've seen some people come on and but I missed that part where you don't have to spend a ton of money on the camera, the mic. I think you said you're using a webcam. I think all three of us are actually. Um, you both are using the Logitech Brio. I've got a, uh, lucid, I think it was a little Kickstarter thing. Um and then um, mike's and then mics. So at the office I used the same one as Jeff. We went in on some nicer like Elvis mics because they were. I don't know, jeff, you can move yours into the frame, get it in there or not. These were our big mics, but I guess you can't see it. But just imagine elvis presley.
Speaker 2:That's or wayne wayne newton with the golden microphone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then, um, here at the house I've got a just a boom mic that sits up out of the frame and it just picks up certain areas. So one of the things. Well, first off there's two mic connections. So you've got USB. That's probably the easiest way to plug right into a computer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you've got the XLR, which is your analog audio. It's a more controllable signal, but in order to have that, you need to have an analog or a piece of hardware that allows you to change the boost, and you can. You can control, like, how people S, you know how that comes, that sound, that that noise can sound annoying in a microphone, and, uh, you can control it with hardware. Tone that back, um, there's mutes, there's all. You can get crazy with it, um and so, knowing there's there's those, uh, but again, you can just get yourself a usb mic and plug it right into your computer and, uh, be good to go with that. And then if you're doing a video one, the biggest thing that you should invest in is lighting.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, so you can have a crappy webcam and put some good lights on it and all of a sudden it looks like a DSLR camera. Yes, like Sean, you're the perfect example right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you mentioned a couple of things that I think are important. If you're going to go XLR, you're going to have to have an audio interface. Some people will use an audio interface even if they're doing USB stuff, but usually XLR means audio interface interface. I have you can't see it, but on my desk, just like kind of right down there, I actually have a small four channel mixer that has an audio interface built into it, but then you have to download a driver for your computer for that and so get, once you get into the technicalities of being able to record like this, even if you're not going to use it for a podcast, you don't have to. But it also starts to get into the like, the gamer environment and live streaming. And are you going to go, you know, stream yard obs, all these other things and um it one can get a little confusing for people that are not technically savvy, especially around audio engineered.
Speaker 2:I'm just kind of fortunate that I've been a music nerd for so long and been in bands, and you know so I'm very. I was already very familiar with XLR inputs for not just microphones but, you know, speakers, and I started playing live music during the pandemic. So I play a little music duo that was, like my, my lifeline to sanity over the past handful of years. And we have, you know, very small specific PA but lots of XLR inputs. So for people that aren't familiar with that world it might be really daunting. But again, I'm just. I'm always a big fan of the simplicity you know. Simplify all those things so they don't become the roadblocks that keep you from doing it. Um, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Any thoughts on the lighting?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, you are. That's right. I have lighting behind me, as you can see on the wall. Um, I created an environment in my office that was specifically like well, I want to improve any of the content we're going to shoot that features me, and so I can change the color of those lights. They're just LEDs, are all, basically, you know, sitting on the floor, but I can change the color of the tone.
Speaker 2:If you're not familiar with having a key light or having a hair light which is really meant to be pointed at the back of your head from behind you and then it kind of brings a halo effect, it doesn't take really much more than a little bit of research on YouTube and just like everything, like remember back in the day when SEO was first on, the people were talking about it. You could spend about 24 to 48 hours of research and next thing you know, you were the foremost SEO expert, in whatever vertical you are in. There's a lot of similarities to that now, like all of our, I mean, but we've been living in instant gratification world for a long time, and if you're wanting instant gratification on becoming a lot more knowledgeable, on having a basic lighting setup for your web calls. Just go to YouTube, spend a little time there and then all of a sudden you'll know the things that we're talking about. But I have right in this setup right now I have a it's kind of a bar light right in front of me above two monitors that I literally use as a monitor light, flat when I'm not doing this and I literally turn it up when I'm going to be on calls like this. And then I have another key light here, or the one that has a little bit of a soft filter to it that comes from this side.
Speaker 2:If I wanted to darken the room more to get that shadow effect on one side of your face, I have no lighting that comes from here, but I have a light colored wall on this side and it reflects. So that's why you get all of those things you can. You can learn pretty quickly if you want a cool looking uh setup, having a backlight and then playing with how bright that light is and also the colors that you choose Like the one behind me right now is like an orange, an orangey yellow color, and it makes this look the way that I want it to. But if you choose like a blue color or magenta. You also then might have to tweak the lights that are in front of you or to the side of you, because it'll wash you out or it'll make you look and you, I have video content of myself that look absolutely shitty, because I either didn't know that stuff or didn't have enough time to put all the lights on the way I wanted, and it'll make you look like you're jaundice, you know, or you're, you know, coming down with the cold or something, and it could just be that your lighting, uh, isn't quite on point, and so I would definitely tell people, you know, there there are there's a couple of like favorite people that I like on on YouTube for that, but like anything like choosing your microphones and your cameras, find the people that really speak to you and they like the way they deliver the content, because you won't have a hard time finding how do I do a basic lighting setup for web calls, you know, or as a vlogger that sometimes is a helpful keyword what people are doing in vlog setups, um, and you'll be off to the races easy yeah, so so much of that.
Speaker 2:I have a you-year-old son who likes to do the game streaming stuff. I'm Atari 2600.
Speaker 1:Pinball man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, anybody want to play some combat? I've got my joystick ready to go. That's me. Hey, I love combat.
Speaker 1:Before we part the lighting one, I would say, if you were looking to get into this, that's where I put my biggest dollar into. Yeah, I went with Elgato, I think it's the real seamless system. So you've got two lights on either side of the door monitors over here. But the nice part is there's this I'm probably not going to be able to get it in the frame, but they have a thing called a stream deck and you can program the buttons here and control your lights right from there. The buttons here and control your lights right from there.
Speaker 1:Um, and so it's nice because I can quickly just change the, the light with the press of a button. So now it's, this is 10 and then 100, and it changes quick. But the, the 10 is what I run when not being on camera, so just some extra light in the room and then the stream. I have an Al Dado. Yeah, I can. I can mute my micro fast. There's different themes and things you can program in, like all the tools or websites that you might visit on a regular basis, like, and then uh like I think this let's see if this still works.
Speaker 1:Uh, soundboard, yeah, I got a soundboard but it's not hooked up to ecamm. Now, yeah, oh, yeah, so you can play all the different tunes and things during the thing control.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah the elgato stream deck? I think you're right, that is what it's called, that different tunes and things during the control scenes. Yeah, the Elgato stream deck, I think you're right, that is what it's called. That that's a little device with a bunch of little buttons on it that illuminate. And you're right, you can program that to do all the things that are probably most you know, the things that you do most frequently in terms of your media setup, and Elgato makes a bunch of cool products. They were you guys probably remember this, but during the pandemic there was a bit of a run on webcams.
Speaker 2:And so you know like I want to get a Logitech anything. Well, too bad, because all you can get are these terrible, crappy ones on Amazon that are made, you know, by you know who knows. Well, I'll spare people. I might think I'm getting too political, but there were junk cameras were pretty much all you could get and nobody was really happy with them. And then, of course, elgato was like hey, well, you can use your iPhone or your smartphone, download this app and I did that for a while because I don't remember what iphone I was using it on but elgato's app to basically turn your iphone into your webcam for calls, just like this, it was 10 times better, even than the old logitech that I was using at the time.
Speaker 1:So it's built into the ios now yeah yeah, use it. In fact, the the camera is too detailed.
Speaker 2:It's like you're, you're looking old guys like, oh, I don't want yeah you're seeing every pore, every everything, wow yeah, you can't turn on the cover. Girl filter, soften it.
Speaker 3:I didn't realize that was the solution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I have an Elgato Facecam Pro that is over here I use for kind of different stuff, sometimes when I'm doing music stuff. Elgato does have some cool products for sure, and, like you said, you're not breaking the bank. I agree with you. I think investing some money in lighting again, depending on what you're going to do with podcasting or subject matter expertise capture um, that's a, that's a really big, important, you know, component to what you know we're doing with the hired guns agency is, even if you don't want to do a podcast, a video interview is exactly what you should be doing and you don't have to invest a lot. But if you're going to do that and you want to look the best that you can, lighting will be important and you can learn very quickly through youtube. You can also make some purchase decision decisions there because there are a lot of people that will walk you through, you know, from budget lighting, budget microphones, cameras, all the way up to the really high end stuff and you know and I use a little bit of all of that you will find out really quickly.
Speaker 2:You guys know this because you've obviously been doing a show like this for so long. But if the lighting that's in front of you isn't some place where you spend a lot of time. You it'll, it will force you to spend a lot of time there because you'll be trying to get uh harsh tones, uh, removed. You'll be trying to figure out well, how does soft lighting work? Do I need a soft box? Do I need one that costs twelve hundred dollars and it has a mesh screen over it? And how close do I want? A 45 degree angle, how close to my face? And you'll see a lot of people, especially, uh, especially really talented photographers that also got into videography one. They usually will walk you through in detail the very best gear, but they also will have setups that I usually try to tell people. Just make sure you are not comparing yourself directly to somebody that has been doing this for yeah yeah, you don't have to.
Speaker 2:You don't have to do that. For me, the bigger part of all of this when it's podcasting or video interviews it's really more of preparing for what you're going to capture in the first place, because the magic and the value is really in the captured content. It's a huge unlock, especially for B2B companies, but I'm sure there are some applications on the B2C side as well. I don't do a whole lot of advocacy of like, hey, dealers, like car dealers, you should get into podcasting, although if your brand and your personality and your market is big enough, there are certainly some use cases that could be very interesting. But on the B2B side companies that are serving various niches within our industry it's still a huge miss.
Speaker 2:You do see a lot of people that will guest on a lot of the various podcasts. I mean very similar to you know, you guys invited me to come and spend time with the dealer refresh audience today. This isn't my audience. There are similarities, you know. Right, it's the car business, but you guys have a trusted legacy brand that's nearly 20 years old, right it's, which is amazing and extremely valuable. But I have to go into an event like this. I would tell other people. But when you're going to join someone else's audience and spend a little time there, be inspired by the fact that you could also be doing this on a little tour of other podcasts where you'll get some notoriety. But why are you not doing that on your own? Why are you not building your own, chasing your own specific audience? Because this here's an example Do the refresh and refresh Friday can capture a the whole industry.
Speaker 2:Right, they might not be interested today to learn like what? Why are you guys talking about podcasting and get to the points that are going to be really valuable? Or give me a takeaway. Or why the hell are you fucking talking about podcasting? Am I allowed to say, oh, yes, one, how many, how many do I get per episode anyway, the? So there's some people that may not be interested in that.
Speaker 2:Some people are like ah, I wish you guys were just talking about EVs again, because we haven't had enough of that, like it's not on the front page of automotive news, enough so. But we have niches within this industry that get very, very specific, meaning they sell a product or a service that only 50% of all of the franchise dealers in the whole North America are really an ideal potential client for. And so you have to think well, if I'm one of those companies, what content am I making right? That speaks just to my part of the audience. That's my target, what you know marketing jargon of your ICP or your ideal customer profile. It may not be the whole industry. In most cases, depending on whatever it is you sell, it's not the entire automotive industry. Yet most companies are. Well, why would we ever do a podcast? They would ask that question because they're marketing the same way they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago and they don't see the value.
Speaker 3:I get it and this is what you're doing with higher guns agency.
Speaker 2:It's yeah, yeah, it's exactly what we're doing. I won't make that a whole pitch, but we spent about 18 months with just a couple of businesses basically taking the things. That really kind of sparked my interest in putting what's going on with Sean up in 2020. That was the unlock to hmm. And then I started to find other people online far outside of automotive where I'm like this is a thing. Oh, okay, I get it. And then I realized well, that's a perfect place to advocate for businesses to capture the thought leadership content from the smartest people in their companies. And right now that's still a really big miss and I know there's skeptics to it.
Speaker 2:But all you got to do is spend a few minutes on LinkedIn trying to scroll through the content that people are in our industry the automotive industry are trying to post, and it's mostly scattershot. Well, hopefully, but it's a lot of the same same, same same stuff. People do a lot of the same types of marketing because it's a lot of the same marketing leadership in our industry. It's the same people that have been doing it, and so their strategies and tactics and their go-to marketing, their GTM, is what they've been doing for a long, long time, but it's all absent, of getting the CEO or the CTO or whoever is really the vision visionary who has so much to share that the target audience they want to hear about. That needs to be insightful and interesting. Educates the audience. There's not nearly enough of that. That needs to be insightful and interesting. Educates the audience. There's not nearly enough of that. It's we're better. Use us because we can tell you how crappy your vendors are or whatever. Yes, there are lots of crappy vendors out there, but your target audience doesn't really wanna hear that as much as they wanna hear. We do this to solve this pain point in dealers and this is how it works. Oh, by the way, and oh, you're feeling this problem and you've had it for the last five years because COVID brought some new things into your business. Hmm, Well, we resolve some of these problems and solve them by doing these things, and if you know you're interested in that, sure we've got you can go deeper with us.
Speaker 2:But there needs to be more of that content where you're really truly helping somebody. And then there also has to be the patience to know that the market isn't in market when you're trying to outbound hardcore sell to them and there's no intent at all in your audience, maybe 2%, but you're marketing in a way that you think that they're going to like. Well, you should be responding to this and take a demo right now, Like you're the one that crashed my party and told me I should take a demo right now and I'm just trying to enjoy a cocktail with friends. So if you use that same analogy and say, well, you maybe are someone that they didn't plan on seeing at the party or they've never met, but you're interesting and you share information that they remember you, that's what every business should be doing is make content for your audience that will make them remember you, like you trust you, Because what ends up happening is people see your content over and over and over, and if it's good content, it's not just loading up the internet with garbage, because there's already enough of that, but if it's good content, then they remember you when the moment strikes that they're like hmm, we need a solution for this, or I need more information about this.
Speaker 2:If you were the one that occupied the space in their mind of thought leadership around, whatever your category is, and you own it and you're likable and you're not a dipshit, you're going to win. And then what happens then? You become the dominant brand in your category and we don't have to think too hard. I won't name names, but I know that the three of us could think of people that, in some way, shape or form, made their brand the de facto.
Speaker 2:Everybody knew of it. They were approachable, they shared a lot of content, it was helpful to their target audience and they were massively successful. They built their companies to the point that they wanted them to grow, and then they sold them and they were, you know, happy, as you know, a pig in slop. Well, it's not that difficult. In fact, it's easier to do that today than ever and it's not particularly expensive either. So that's why I think it's great that you guys wanted to talk about this, because people definitely need to know you don't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on all of the setup, all of the software, all of the lighting, all of the. You can literally spend a few hundred dollars and turn out a really great product that's going to be helpful to your business.
Speaker 1:There's a question from the audience on that, very so. Brent asks what budget should companies set for this kind of content per subject matter, expert or just one figurehead?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. The way we do that, we have a pricing set. I mean you can see it actually on our website. We just post it on there so that people don't really have to ask deep questions. But we don't charge per subject matter expert. So if your company has two or three people who own their own area, for us it's just one price. It's based on how many hours or how many episodes we're going to record in a given month. For us, so if you have three subject matter experts and one's going this month and one's going the next month or you decide you want to do two in one month, you know it's always based on how many episodes we're going to. So, yeah, I as far as the the. That's how the pricing goes. So was there a second part of that question that Brent had?
Speaker 1:No, what. What kind of budgets, though, should companies?
Speaker 2:really be thinking about here.
Speaker 1:Anywhere, I can't speak for other people that run some of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, I'm not going to name specific names. I know there are people that do podcasting in our industry that are looking for sponsors. So they want to come to a company and say, hey, for $5,000, we'll put your logo on this episode. Maybe it's relevant to what your company does, maybe it's not, but you trust my brand, cause I built a person. I'm not saying me specifically.
Speaker 2:I didn't do this with what's going on with Sean. I thought about it, you know, years ago and I was like I just didn't think there was enough value to it. To be honest with you and I'm not although some people might think I am, I'm I'm not so drowning in Lake me that I thought, oh, I'm going to make this because of my own personal brand, I'm going to bring all that. But and not that there's anything wrong with that For those of you that might see this content or you're like hell, you're talking about me, maybe I am, but that's fine if it works for you. But if you're a company considering drafting off of or renting another audience, especially if it's a personal brand, great. There's some things that you need to ask about in terms of the value. So, pricing wise, you could have somebody say well, we've built this podcast and it's going to be five grand a month. If you want to be a sponsor and they I'm sure have their service description of what you get for that sponsorship I don't think it's particularly a whole lot of value for the big dollars like that. That's not something that I recommend For us. It's simple. You can see on our website, for people that don't want to do a full podcast and they want to do what we call SME capture, which is, I want your subject matter expertise captured, because that's how we make great content from it.
Speaker 2:We have a package. I think at the low end is like $1,750 a month, but that's us putting the stuff into distribution that you send us a raw file. We cut up shorts for you. We give you written assets, something that isn't all chat, gpt, written because it's inspired by hey, your CEO sat down with us for 30 or 60 minutes or sat. We sit down together, put that together. We brief. No one comes in, by the way, not prepared to have these conversations. They shine like the rock stars they are, because you're basically just talking about the things they're already so comfortable with. But yeah, so I think the top package this is is just us. I can't speak for everybody else. Top thing that we sell is somewhere around 35 or 37 hundred dollars, and in that you get hosting, full distribution to every place you can listen. You get a certain number of video assets cut up that you can use.
Speaker 2:Obviously, that's part of the point of this written assets, blog article, email articles, social post copy to complement all of the other things that now you're going to use. That's what we found, you know. Not trying to make this a sales pitch, what we found, what I found was there are so many companies that offer amazing products and services that probably sit there and say why doesn't anybody know who we are? Like nobody even knows we exist and we have awesome stuff. And some companies literally never made it. They literally shut their doors because nobody ever knew who they were, but I guarantee you, if they did anything in marketing, it certainly wasn't. Well, let's get your subject matter expertise on camera, on, you know, captured, so that we can actually turn that into the things that your audience really cares about.
Speaker 2:Instead, all of the go to marketing strategies in not just automotive but for the last 15 years, have been primarily built on segmenting the sales and marketing roles into specialists, right?
Speaker 2:So all you know how to do is set up Google Ads okay, great, give them a Pat McAfee clap. That's fantastic. But what we really needed to do is we needed to get more and have a. I feel really lucky because I know how to do so many things and I've been it as a marketer, but also I was a salesperson for years and and so I I love knowing from the customer and learning from the customer. But that said, pricing wise, I think if you have a budget that's certainly less than $5,000 a month, you can make a lot of. You can make a lot of content If you know what you're doing. That will be extremely effective for your brand, and I mean it's. It's just not a not a place where you have to spend nearly as much money as you would. If you were going to go chase a google ads campaign which is going to burn through and you won't get basic in b2b, I would basically say if you're spending anything b2b marketing in google, you probably should chop it by about 80 so.
Speaker 1:So two things based on your response to that question there, sean, not about the dollars, but in light of things that we were talking about earlier in the show we were talking about from Dealer Refresh's perspective, the hardest part is the logistics. Yeah, yeah, actually sitting on the camera and and and everything afterward is it sort of happens, it flows organic. At that point it's the content's been created, but. But getting to the point where you're actually creating the content is the hardest part in getting all of that together. I think that's where the value in hiring an expert really comes into play.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then once you do have all that great content. Where are you going to utilize that content? You've got to make sure it's getting in front of the right people at the right time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's content creation and then there's distribution. Right, yeah, where's it going to go?
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me feed you another one here, sean. And based on what Jeff's saying, we are seeing a shift in Google and Facebook, especially right now, and it shifted prior, shifted at COVID as well. So these channels that people have used, say, in the car business, if you're a vendor, your automotive news is your CDNs, your dealer refreshes your, whatever these things ebb and flow. They can have down quarters of viewership for whatever reasons or whatever it might be, but even again, facebook and Google. For speaking on the vendor side, google likes to. If you're doing certain types of paid search advertising, they like to stick their own keywords in on you and if you're not paying attention to it, very quickly your phone's ringing with people who have nothing to do with the car business whatsoever, just because Google went nuts.
Speaker 1:I think Facebook even, uh, because that's a pay-to-play place now, um, you're not going to get any eyeballs if you don't boost your posts. So you got to pay to boost your posts and you also have to make sure they're being boosted the right audience, because and you can't like targeting on facebook's impossible. Ever since the Cambridge stuff, they have closed that door down. So, the people liking your posts after you boost them and stuff like that. Uh, I like to go in and look at them and be like how, what percentage?
Speaker 2:of these people do, I know are in the car business. That's a very important thing to do and would tell people to to pay attention to that. On linkedin as well, there there's a myth that, uh, linkedin is the best place if you're, you know, selling to dealers, to car dealers and it's a small percentage I don't know what it is, I don't know that, we would ever know for sure but any of us can tell that there's not nearly the percentage of actual dealers spending hours in LinkedIn, as there are service providers and vendors that spend a lot of time. It doesn't mean there aren't any folks on the retail side, because there are, but you have to know that and you have to pay attention to what you're saying. Jeff, is where you're going to distribute all of your content. Um, if you don't already know your audience so well which, for some companies, could be that your audience research, your target market research, would have already told you that most of your audience spends its time in Instagram and Facebook and a little less so in LinkedIn, and then you're going to prioritize accordingly, but not everyone knows that to start.
Speaker 2:So then, where do you start? Well, you start by actually putting your content in all of those places and then paying attention to what's happening on what people would refer to as dark social, which is pretty much not trackable. There's not. I've researched and experimented with three different tools that say they can track it. None of them really can. Ga4 may be opening the door to a little bit better of that, but let me just back up on that. So dark social is your company posts something on LinkedIn and somebody jumps into the comments and they don't make a comment, but they share it with a friend right, you're not tracking that. Or they grab the article out of LinkedIn and they copy the link and they message it to or text it to a friend. There's no model that tracks all of that accurately. So there's a lot of things that happen within, especially for B2B companies. So if you're B2B and you're selling products or services to dealers, you really want to pay attention to the type of content you create.
Speaker 2:And then what happens and what would be considered dark social, because most businesses are not capturing self-reported attribution at all and that's a really big key. And let me two more things. So in case people are like well, I don't understand dark social, well, you can look it up if you don't understand the couple examples that I gave. But on self-reported attribution, if you, on your primary forms of your company's site, add to your form one, just make sure that it's not a particularly restrictive form, but add a question that says how did you hear about us? And if you want to have a dropdown and they can choose Google or a friend or whatever, that's fine, but better yet an open field that they could actually type something in.
Speaker 2:The more you start to do a strategy like, hey, our content's going to build up our brand and now people are going to become more familiar with us, the more you're going to want to have a capture methodology like that for self-reported attribution, because you'll find that people say, well, I saw your content, da-da-da-da-da, or such and such CEO can't stop saying great things about you and we don't do a really good job of that in automotive, of capturing that other part, and it's really, especially if you own your category and people are really familiar with your subject matter experts. You want to know that, you want to know that and you have to have some way of capturing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you stop thinking about adding a form or adding to our forms little drop down. How'd you hear about?
Speaker 2:so I'm gonna put walk in and drive by yeah, we're, we're, uh, actually for our own site, we're, we're kind of going back through all of that right now we had set up some of those things. We we set up the you know direct, you know book an appointment through Calendly and all that which I I'm a big advocate for that as well.
Speaker 1:You know, definitely. So we we've got Calendly up on the fricking tech sites and it is another API call that's slowing the site. This would be all really yeah, yeah, go through and start looking at all the different things, because plugins and yeah adding up, they do up, yeah, they do where they were doing now they're doing five, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:In our world. Boy, that's been an issue for the website providers for a long, long time. Having worked for a couple of them over the years, I remember when we started and all credit to Mike DeVito at DealerOn. I remember he started using webpagetestorg religiously and I don't know if Google was using it to power PageSpeed insights at the time or not, but I started using it heavily in sales and business development because you could literally show somebody well, here's when I won't name any vendors, but here's when this starts to load on your site and why it's actually causing such a delay. Because some people's code happens to be a little junk or heavy, and it was very interesting to see.
Speaker 2:You know some of the vendors. They're like this is a great service, yeah, but it's costing you three seconds of load time on the site. So then it's well, is it, is it worth? Is the juice worth the squeeze? And? But you could, we could do a whole episode on website providers, like how come no one's ever held them accountable for better than a two percent in a conversion rate after nearly 30 years? It's your only job that's a good point do you have any uh?
Speaker 3:any? Do you have any case studies or anything with Hired Guns, any businesses where you were able to step in and implement everything that you're doing and just seen amazing results?
Speaker 2:We haven't built an official case study on it yet, but I can share some statistics or I can share some examples I think might be of interest to people. If you were to go to Google right now and you were to type in automotive BDC, you likely are gonna see that the first organic listing is straw lid, which is the first company. I've known their CEO, vinnie, for years goes back into my reach local days, so probably mid 2006-07 maybe. Anyway that you know, if you're selling outsourced BDC services, that that's a niche of our our market and when I, when I first, when Vinny first reached out to me around marketing of straw lead, I didn't have a lot of great ideas because that's a very difficult target to figure out and from an organic perspective, it was a big challenge because there was no domain authority. There was just a lot to work through.
Speaker 2:So we started to capture the subject matter expertise, just this same way video, audio record. Of course, everyone's prepared. We already know what we're going to talk about, but we started to tie that to keywords that were the most lucrative and I talk so much. So hopefully people will be able to track the SEO value of doing these things while you almost in anything SEO, you never guarantee or promise to people but if you're deeply niched, you probably don't have more than 20 or 25 keywords that you even should spend much time on, that are lucrative to you right, that actually produce the best results. In some cases you don't even have 25 keywords that I would, and I have a fair amount of experience in all things search, both paid and organic. And if you're working with an agency, that well, we're going to continue to feed the Google machine. They'll want to chase as many keywords as you'll let them, but you'll find out that the deeper research you do, that none of those things actually pay off. So first, first it was a little bit of keyword research on what's most valuable to them. Automotive BDC was like the runaway winner, like we got to get on the page for that. So we started to not just capture content, but we started to actually then do written content. That would then inspire Vinny to even write more content. That then got handed off to their SEO team. That was writing content for their website. Next thing, you know these interior pages about the cost of automotive BDC, training, turnover, all of the pain points that dealers typically feel that leads them to, which are usually all their signals that say they might be actually right in the target as a buyer for us or interested. You pay attention to all of those things and realize that you could actually get a lot of improvement in organic and direct traffic if you basically adopt that part of the strategy. So we started to do that implementation on all of the video content. We started to do the.
Speaker 2:Even though people will be like VSEO, that sounds like the you know the trendy hot take of years past and it was kind of BS or whatever. It's not. If you know what you're doing, you absolutely can get thumbnails and all kinds of stuff, like if another search, you know, for those who are following along, if you, if you type in automotive bdc cost, you'll probably see a whole lot of thumbnails of content that came from episodes and material that we created for uh, for astrology, and so what happened with them? In like just year one, their LinkedIn metrics exploded. You know 600% growth and reach. When you're starting from almost zero, you're going to have those numbers. So it'd be easy for anybody to say well, sean, like where did you start from? That's very important.
Speaker 2:A lot of people Dennis Galbraith, famously I took from him, like you can torture the data until it confesses um, you know, make it, say whatever you want, um, but in reality the reach and engagement is specifically comments, people truly engaging with the content for for that particular customer, for straw lid, in LinkedIn, facebook, instagram, youtube. All of it just pretty much went off the charts and they kind of became the de facto. They're the voice If, if, if, what you're looking for and you want more information on outsourced BDC, straw lid went from hey, we've got an awesome service, but not a lot of people know who we are. How do we get the word out? All of the methods that I tried for Straled before using a podcast as the capture methodology for subject matter expertise, had unimpressive results.
Speaker 2:And then we started to capture Vinny's subject matter expertise and establish thought leader and it fundamentally changed the game and almost all those categories like reach, it was, you know, 450% growth. Engagement, you know, just off the charts, where previously there was almost no engagement, unless maybe it was employees, which you should do that Get your employees to at least start. But also, you know, make sure that the content you're making is what your audience actually wants. And that was the sweet spot. Vinny started putting content out there and that's exactly what people interested in that topic wanted to hear out there, and that's exactly what people interested in that topic wanted to hear let's.
Speaker 2:I just did some of the searches and, yeah, it's dominating yeah, that becomes one of the things where we, when we engage with um clients, we we tell them about that, we want them to know that it's important, but we don't. We, like anybody talking about SEO, we don't promise that. We just say that is one of the strategies and that's one of the tactics that we're gonna, that we know about, we know how to do it, that we want a potential client to know. We're gonna chase that for you. We're gonna figure out, like what are your you know most valuable keywords that maybe you're not really doing too well for, and we're also going to tell them that the written assets that we create from each of these episodes are also include content that will help you in terms of building new page content for your own website. So much like when dealers started to build better vehicle research pages right, and it started to help them from, you know, not just a local SEO perspective, but really the things that get into, like the used car strategy that I think cars I don't know if carscom was first or car gurus, but they started to do some things in their SEO strategy within the H1 or H2, I think was really the bigger place that they were seeing massive success and just dominating search results. Elements of those things are always in play.
Speaker 2:But when you're a very deeply niched business, there are some things that become much more specific.
Speaker 2:Around the targets you're chasing because you're not. Your audience isn't millions around the targets you're chasing because you're not, your audience isn't millions, it's maybe 10,000, but it's doable. So we always let people know we, we can likely help you there, but we don't promise it, so we don't put a price tag on. Hey, the seo component is because if we could guarantee it every single time, I guarantee you we'd be charging thousands of dollars because it's very difficult. I mean, we've had episodes where we've literally in 20, and I used to love these old stories but we've today. We well, I should say about a week ago we had posted content and in less than 24 hours there was a thumbnail of the video content that we had posted that come up in search results. So if that and that can happen, if it's not a particularly popular keyword to millions of people but deep in your niche, it's not difficult to understand that that becomes really valuable. If that's the playground that you're on, yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 1:You make a hell of a case here. Definitely got me rethinking some stuff. Yeah, I can see that you make a hell of a case here.
Speaker 2:Definitely got me rethinking some stuff. Dealers are and I've said this for the last several years car dealers are addicted to leads. It's all of our faults, all of us veterans that have been in it forever. We started hawking leads people through fax machines before even 50 of the you know dealer world even had websites way back in the days late 90s, even early 2000s. But you know, the last five to seven years of my life that's really focused me much more on b2b marketing.
Speaker 2:A lot of the companies that sell products and services to dealers are, no, not, they're no different. They also just live off. I want more leads, leads, leads, leads, leads. And if there's one thing that I would want people to take away if they're, especially if they're a service provider or a vendor, is if you don't know what your customer acquisition cost is like, how much it costs you to acquire one customer, and then you don't know what the payback period is for that one customer, which in our industry is probably average of twenty four months, and yet the investment instead of hey, let's, let's put a little bit of our budget into a really smart subject matter expertise driven content strategy. No, let's hire more inside sales people or more outside sales people, or more sales people for the territory, all of whom are going to struggle to because the market's so difficult. They're all going to struggle to sell enough quota. You know monthly recurring revenue even in their first 90 days to justify the job that they took.
Speaker 2:My point being a lot of companies need to think twice about whether or not they need to invest more in their sales department for go-to-market versus their marketing department, and that means that if you talk to somebody that knows well, here's some of the cuts you could make maybe in both of those places. But then to align them, there's still a lot of misalignment within marketing and sales and often it's because there's too heavy of an investment on one side or the other, and in the last 15 years we have so segmented both of those departments where I think we have too many sales specialist roles, too many marketing specialist roles. Do we really need a brand marketer, a product marker, an event marketer, a content marketer, a digital marketer? So it gets to be a little nonsensical very quickly and then you're in the exact same place where you've always been, which could be very frustrated because you know you have a great service or a great product and just not enough people know. Well, that's because all you're doing is outbound hardcore.
Speaker 2:Let's go procure a list of people out of Zoom info. Let's go use hunterio and get a bunch of email addresses and let's just spam the living shit out of people. Or let's expect that everybody that comes to the trade show booth that you paid $100 to basically bribe them into a demo, that they actually had high intent, and then they don't. And then you're like well, how many scans did we have at the booth? And you're like, well, let's calculate that back to how many deals we did. And then you realize, oh my goodness, let's not tell the CFO what the numbers are on that. And yet again, those same companies are not actually making content that showcases their thought leadership, which could be a really big unlock and easy thing to add. So I mean it it's. It can be very myopic, but it really has a bigger effect, um than just hey, should we do a podcast or should we do video interviews and turn it into marketing content? The answer to that, I think, is easy, but big effect answer to that, I think, is easy, but big effect.
Speaker 3:Well, if someone wants to jump on board with that which uh gives your credentials or your uh points of contact website, all that good stuff yeah, I would certainly that.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you guys, um, making that an opportunity. Uh, the website is hiredguns agencycom. Um, you can go there. Uh, we just very recently, in the last few weeks, because we spent so much time kind of like getting ourselves to like this is where we want to be. People will probably notice that I personally am putting a lot more content into LinkedIn because we're not ready for this, but the site is hired guns agencycom. There's no hyphens, no spaces, just hired guns agencycom. There you can find on one of the pages where you can book time. So my Calendly is there if people just want to have a call set up 15 or 30 minutes and just have questions.
Speaker 2:Love talking to people. That's been happening a lot in the last couple of weeks. Are just people like what are you doing? Because I have found that a lot of people don't realize that I'm actually not doing dealership marketing. I don't realize that I'm actually not doing dealership marketing. I'm actually trying to help all the companies that sell their stuff to dealers and, surprisingly, a lot of people are like we had no idea even what you're doing now. Like, oh, that's interesting, so feel free to book some time. Just go to hiredgunsagencycom and go to the I think the YS page and you'll find the place where it says book a call or schedule a call. That's probably the best. You can also get me at sean shaun, hiredgunsagencycom.
Speaker 3:That's the direct email address how'd you get a hold of that url?
Speaker 2:um, well, many people have asked me how did I get dealer superhero? That's true. You know, way, way back in the day, when all of us were much younger and sexier, I bought dealeradvisorcom. That was kind of one of my first little companies. I remember that and remember I had the stick figure with the superhero cape. That was the early inspiration, for somebody bought dealer advisor from me for $8,000 many, many moons, moons ago and then I don't think I've ever even used it.
Speaker 2:Um, I won't tell you who, because if you don't know who they are, you'll definitely know who they're related to. But the day that I sold it I was like I wonder if dealer superhero dot com is available. So I bought dealer superhero dot com and then, um, I love tombstone, I love westerns, period. But I, if Tombstone's on it doesn't even matter if it's just a TV version. I can't get enough of Tombstone and I especially love Valkyrie, it's so good. That was the inspiration for like hired guns. So it's not, it's not anything other than I just love kind of the Westerns and the idea of, hey, a business would hire Wyatt and his brothers to come and like let's, let's get things right in your town.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I need to go back and watch that and that's a classic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very good, sean. Definitely a pleasure. It's great catching up with you. I know we spoke earlier this week, but it definitely had been way too long.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the time flies with both of you guys because we don't stay in contact enough, but I'm really thanks for having me on the show. Very much appreciate your brand. Like I was telling you the other day, jeff, there are very valuable legacy brands in our industry that I think are really important and have you know the way you guys have made your choices around. You know media distribution and the types of things that you want to get into. I think there are points of differentiation in that that are really important. So I'm just glad you guys keep on keeping on and I'm really thankful for the opportunity. It means a lot to me, you, you got it.
Speaker 3:Thanks for your comments. We'll be right back. Oh, oh, oh oh, We'll be right back. Outro Music.