Do you use videos in your marketing efforts? How can you use video to spark an interest in your audience? Can you combine video content to boost readership on your blog posts?

In this podcast episode, Sam Carvalho speaks about why video is a potent marketing tool for your private practice with Nathan Labenz.

Podcast Sponsor: Brighter Vision

When you’re in private practice it can be tough to find the time to even review your marketing efforts, let alone to make improvements where needed.

By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers are then able to create you a beautiful website that will attract your ideal clients and get them to contact you. Better yet, they also provide unlimited tech support to make sure it’s always up-to-date, and professional search engine optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches – all at no additional cost.

But best of all, we’ve worked with them to create a special offer just for Marketing a Practice listeners. Get your first 3 months of website service completely FREE. To take advantage of this amazing deal, head to brightervision.com/joe. 

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[SAM CARVALHO] Welcome to the Marketing a Practice podcast with me, Sam Carvalho where you’ll discover everything you need to know about marketing and branding your business. To find out more about how I can help you brand new business visit www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. If you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. Nathans is the CEO of the world’s first input free automated marketing platform for video. Using cutting-edge marketing tools, the Waymark platform enables businesses of all sizes to optimize their video messaging. Nathan’s expertise in identifying and resolving roadblocks to corporate success led Waymark, to define that anyone can edit video space. It is an ideal solution for enterprise companies concerned with corporate branding and content governance, but also for marketers, sales people, franchisees, small businesses, and even freelancers who need to create professional video messages. Nathan is an expert in leadership, digital transformation and content governance that empowers businesses to take control of their own advertising. Nathan can also speak with authority on the topics of entrepreneurship, problem-solving and the constant back and forth between brand alignment and empowerment. Hi Nathan, thanks so much for joining us today. [NATHAN LABENZ] Hi Sam. Thank you. It’s great to be here. [SAM] As always, what I do with all of my guests is can you share a bit of your backstory and how you got to where you are now? [NATHAN] Sure. Well, I guess very briefly I was inspired to become an internet entrepreneur because I happened to go to college and be in the same dorm in college as the founding team from Facebook. While I didn’t have any opportunity to, I probably could have made my way to invest at the time, but I wasn’t forward thinking enough and I was never asked so I didn’t get in the ground floor of Facebook, but I did have a very up-close view of their initial launch and meteoric success. That really created a yes, it was a fascinating thing to see. I mean, the guys involved were very much amateurs. I think the movie, The Social Network does a pretty decent job of highlighting that. Although I would say it’s probably a bit unfairly biased against Zuckerberg, I think is, not that I know I’m super or knew him super well, but I think he’s a better guy than he’s portrayed as in that movie. But it really created a big change because of the time everybody was interested in going into law or business management consulting or investment banking or something like that. His initial success or their initial success really shifted a ton of people’s attention to online entrepreneurship and I was no exception to that. So I started a small sort of a practice actually myself after graduating from college. My very first business was essentially a resume editing business. I had worked at the writing, the undergraduate writing tutoring center in college and so I felt that was maybe the only thing I was qualified to do immediately after school. So I started a small website and ended up attracting a lot of clients actually in Asia, predominantly coming from South Korea and Taiwan. Those two different groups of clients were looking for help creating the documents that they would need to either get, in some cases, a job, often into like a graduate school program in the US. So myself initially just working totally alone and then with a small team served as editors, proofreaders, and a little bit of like cultural translators for our clients. I had a lot of fun doing that, built that into not a huge business by any means. It’s definitely always a small business but that was my first experience in entrepreneurship. One of the big things that I experienced there was just the power of referrals from past customers to grow businesses. Mine in particular, we, I tried a bunch of different advertising. I tried doing Google AdWords and I tried this and that. This was more than 10 years ago so at that point, Facebook advertising was barely yet a thing. None of that stuff really worked. I found it was really easy to spend a thousand dollars on Google AdWords and not really necessarily get much from it. I’m sure a lot of your listeners may have been down that road. That’s not necessarily the fault of AdWords. I don’t think I had all the things in place that I probably would’ve needed to be successful in terms of just a quality website or even like credible reputation that somebody clicked on that link and then they looked at my site and it was probably not the best site. They’re like, well, do I really trust this thing? I think a lot of times they came to the conclusion that, well, not really, and these are important, I think in general practice style businesses deal with important things for people. Ours was maybe not the most important, but definitely was a big moment in our customer’s lives when they were trying to make a change and move halfway around the world and get into a professional program of some sort. So they did really care and they really wanted to make sure that they had a good provider and we just, I don’t think from a search to a click to our site, it wasn’t really working and spending money just wasn’t really effective for attracting new customers whereas just asking our existing customers. I built a couple little hooks into our system to create the moment to ask or ask at the right time in a systematic way, just asking folks to refer others who they knew that might need our service was tremendously effective and allowed ultimately the business to grow beyond where I could personally support all the demand. That’s what ultimately turned it into a more real business where I was actually hiring people to help do the work. That was all driven by customer referrals. So from there, I went on in a way inspired by that experience to start an early reviews platform specifically for professionals. Again, this was 10-ish years ago now. At the time we had Yelp and Yelp was pretty good. If you wanted to find a restaurant review, they didn’t do too much else yet beyond restaurants. There really wasn’t much else online. So you could, even for things that now you would totally expect to find reviews for like a real estate agent, couldn’t really find a lot there. So with a friend, I started a business that really tried to not necessarily replicate, but take the best learnings from my small business owner experience around how to ask for referrals from customers, how to ask for testimonials from customers and try to productize that and systematize it. We launched that reviews platform with a bunch of tools for really individual professionals and very small business owners to try to create that sort of dynamic for themselves. That was initially successful. We built it very much on the Facebook platform just because the social connectivity there was really second to none and largely remains second to none. That business went a little bit sideways or read very sideways because eventually Facebook shut down access to the social graph information that we needed to be successful. We didn’t really expect that, we were definitely weren’t prepared for it. We didn’t even really know why they were doing it at the time. Now, looking back enough information has come out that we know that they did that as a defensive move because there was a lot of abuse of the platform and all the data access. Even though we were trying to do something very positive and prosocial that was just washed away by the general concern that like, hey, we cannot give all these different people that we don’t really know access to our data. So a few years ago, ultimately we pivoted that business into what is now Waymark. The connection was we had at the time a platform where you could have a profile and have all your reviews and tools to share those and show those off as a small business person and we’d constantly get different requests for different ways to show off the review content. People were always like, it’s great that I have this profile on your site and that I have all this stuff here, but I need that to go more places for me and work harder for me. So we initially just started to create the simplest design tools that we possibly could, that would feature reviews and testimonials. Because we had, I think, 2 million reviews and testimonials already in the database that was like a good place for us to start and have a new direction for the business that has certainly evolved. Now Waymark, I would say is not just about reviews and testimonials. It’s really about making video content creation as easy as we possibly can, but still a big thing that folks use our product for is to create videos that feature their reviews or their testimonials or anything that they have something that they want to show off but it’s hard for them to make that into professional quality contents that we try to bridge that gap. We do see a lot of testimonial or review style content coming out of what small business folks create with our product. So that was a bit of a long history, but — [SAM] Amazing. No — [NATHAN] That brings us to the present day. [SAM] It’s a very interesting story and I think, yes, I mean, we discussed this off the recording, but I think your history with the review side of things is very relevant to our audience specifically because obviously they are a trust-based industry and they do rely very heavily on reviews and referrals as well. So I think they’ll find it very interesting to make use of Waymark for that specific purpose, as you said. Can you delve into why video is such a potent marketing tool? [NATHAN] Yes, I mean, I think it’s pretty simple really. It’s just become the default mode for almost all communication. Certainly, it’s increasingly the default mode for any business communication and that’s really just a function of where people like to spend their time and how they like to engage with content. The statistics on how much video people watch are truly mind blowing. I know the US statistics’ best, but depending on which survey you’d trust most or whatever, in which age group you’re looking at, people are watching anywhere between six and as much as nine hours of video content per day, across different devices. Obviously, if you go back a number of years, that’s all TV and now it’s still a lot of TV plus a lot of stuff online and a lot of stuff on their phones. Obviously, there’s a whole proliferation of devices and ways that people engage with content, but six to nine hours, that’s like a third to a half of your waking day. So the opportunity to connect with people in that format where they’re just spending so much time it’s, you have to meet the audience where they are. You have to make things easy for them to absorb. I think people are willing to do, they’re willing to read. I think the idea that reading is dead, I think is a bit overblown, but I think people are willing to read when they’re motivated. They’re willing to read when something has their attention when they’re curious, when they really want to find out more. But they’re not necessarily going to read before that. So I think one of the big functions of video is being that soft introduction where it’s like the message is spoon-fed to folks in the way that all the the content that they’re consuming on a daily basis is spoon-fed to them. If it’s successful, it probably is the beginning of a relationship or even a pre-relationship where they’re going to do more investigation and ultimately be willing to read, but you’ve got to earn their attention in the first place. For many businesses video is the best way to do that. I sometimes divide the world into businesses that people search for and businesses that people don’t. You probably have a bit of a mix in the audience in terms of, certainly I think people do sometimes go search for a particular practice that they feel they need. We work with all kinds of small businesses and some have that dynamic. Others are like, hey, I invented a new thing and that could be a new product, that could be a new service, that could be a new service that’s offered in a practice format. If people don’t know that it exists, then they’re definitely not going to be searching for it. So in that case, you have to figure out a way to get out in front of people and make them aware that it exists. That is, I think where video is really indispensable. If you need to introduce your business, there’s really not a better format in which to do that than video. [BRIGHTER VISION] When you’re in private practice, it can be tough to find the time to even review your marketing efforts, let alone to make improvements where needed. Whether you are a seasoned clinician with an existing website in need of a refresh or a new therapist, building a website for the first time, Brighter Vision is the perfect solution. By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers are then able to create you a beautiful website that will attract your ideal clients and get them to contact you. Better yet, they also provide unlimited tech support to make sure it’s always up to date and professional search engine optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches all at no additional cost. But best of all, we worked with them to create special offer just for the Marking a Practice listeners. Get your first three months of website service, completely free. To take advantage of this amazing deal, head to brightervision.com/joe. Again, that’s brightervision.com/joe. [SAM CARVALHO] Can people make the most of their video marketing and maybe we can focus specifically with regards to say turning reviews into videos? [NATHAN] Yes. Well, I think that’s, I have actually a question for you. I don’t know what would be the, maybe you would have a go-to site, what would you say is the number one place for the kinds of practice businesses that are listening to collect reviews in the first place? it’s probably not Yelp but is there a particular place where people would say this is the site that makes the most sense for me to build reputation and collect those sort of clients? [SAM] I know Psychology Today. Psychology Today is definitely a place where they do that. Yes, that’s actually the first and I think just Google Review. People use that as well. Does that answer your question? [NATHAN] Yes, I’m not familiar with Psychology Today, but I think that sounds apt. Certainly Google and Facebook as well, both have very general-purpose review products. Google in particular, definitely when people search, that’s going to be the first thing that they see. So, yes, I mean, I think building that content in the first place is really important. Again, with psychology, obviously you’re going to have a bit of a different dynamic than you would in a lot of the businesses where there’s a little bit less of a sort of privacy concern. We’re doing this early in the morning here, Eastern Time, US. So the guys that are going to come fix my stairs at my house later today aren’t here yet. But that’s something where I’m happy to put my name and assuming they do a good job, I’m happy to put my name and face on that wherever and just say, hey, these guys did a great job on my stairs and that’s that. In a psychology context, a lot more delicate, obviously of a dynamic there. So I would assume, although I haven’t investigated it myself that a review site dedicated to this business and this professional client relationship would probably have some special features to allow people to preserve anonymity. I think that stuff is going to be really important, so just being sensitive about the experience that you’re asking folks to go through, definitely really important. But assuming that you’ve got something there that you’re confident in and that you feel like people can go leave a review or a testimonial and do so in a way that will feel good to them, then I would really recommend asking for that and figuring out where in your client life cycle is the right place. I wouldn’t necessarily pretend to know. Again, it probably varies quite a bit across different practice types and modalities. The stairs guys, they should ask me at the end of the job, they should give me something and they should make it as easy as possible. They should probably have something where they say, okay, the job is done. Here we are. We’re looking at the stairs, the stairs look good. Maybe they hand me a card with a QR code that’s like scan here to go to my preferred review page. Often you can have the link directly to the leave a review experience. So I could then go snap, boom, open up directly to that place where I’m already into the mode of typing. Those little kinds of thoughtful, just greasing the wheels or trying to identify, like, what are the barriers that people might have to actually doing this, I think that’s honestly simple, conceptually. It’s really important for the throughput. A big aspect of practice businesses is like, you don’t necessarily have that many customers. That’s why reviews were initially, online reviews initially took off with restaurants before other things. The big thing is they have a lot of customers. A restaurant may serve 50 tables a day, a hundred tables a day, whatever. So you can get by in a world where if one of your, well, like if 1% of your customers as a restaurant leaves a review on an online site, you’ll probably get like one a day, one every other day. My sister manages a sushi restaurant and that’s about the clip that they come in. She comes home from a long day and checks the reviews on pretty much a daily basis. Very often there’s something new there for her. In a practice type environment where you may have a couple dozen clients, would be probably as many as most could handle on an ongoing basis and you have those for a while, you’re not just naturally going to accumulate a lot of content because if 1% of your clients leave a review just organically without being asked, and maybe you only get like one a year, that’s not going to build any sort of substantial or trust building online reputation at all quickly. So asking, I think is really important and just saying here’s why this matters. People really need to know that I have a good relationship with clients in order to feel confident in moving forward, even just to have a first engagement with me and your contribution to that confidence building would be really appreciated. Here’s a really, really easy way to do it; follow exactly this link and type a few things. You’d really be doing me a big service in that regard. I think figuring out the right time to ask and actually doing that asking is really key to having an online reputation in the first place. Going back to your original question how do you turn that content into video, I mean, Waymark is definitely a product that makes it pretty easy to do. We would describe it, we are often described as like Squarespace for video where you get to go choose a template, which is to say, you get to choose a style and a vibe and a length of video much like again a Squarespace, you choose a template site tat’s like, oh, I like this. This could work for me. Then you make it your own by filling in all the details, which is like, what do you want to say? What’s your brand? What’s your logo? You can change color scheme and get into all that. But we’ve got a whole bunch of different video templates that are designed to show off the testimonial content that we know so many businesses want to show off. We have two main formats also. One is just highlights. So if you have written content, a common way to show that off would be, let’s say on Psychology Today, you’ve got a profile and you’ve got 20 testimonials on there. Maybe go snip out some powerful phrases from a few of them. We’ve got, again, a lot of templates that are predesigned to show off that content, so you sort of drop them in. Maybe include a link to the full site. If you’re going to post this on Google My Business, which I think is really a dramatically underutilized tool, because Google My Business, you can post video there for free and it will pop up when people search for you at no additional cost. Yet I think something like 1% of businesses from what I see actually do that. So just taking, even if you’re just taking the review content that you have, maybe it’s on Psychology Today, maybe it’s already on Google my Business and turning that into a first, hey, you want to learn more? A lot of people are just, first thing I’ll do is just click on the video and see what it says, showcasing highlights from your reviews or testimonials. Right there is a great place to get started. Then the other video that we have, and this one was a little bit more involved but actually showing the client speaking is extremely powerful. That again is the thing that will be often very delicate and not necessarily something everybody’s going to want to do and not something you would want to ask everyone to do in the context of especially more psychology style practices, but it is extremely, extremely powerful. When people can see real people who have gone through the process of a product or a service and come out the other end, smiling and happy to talk about it and happy to recommend it, one of the biggest things that people want to know is just like, is this going to be okay? Is this going to be worthwhile? What have other people experienced who have gone before me? So we do that thing with again, a wide variety of businesses and it’s always extremely effective. It does take a little bit more work because you have to actually get that video. Some clients can just do it straight from a cell phone and others may be uncomfortable or just not have the charisma on camera to deliver good content for you. But if you do have folks willing and able to even just record a short testimonial video on a cell phone, then again, there’s a lot of, we’re not the only site, obviously that does this, but we’re the site that I know best. There’s a lot of templates that are designed to elevate from a design and branding standpoint, a very simple user-generated piece of video content. What we find in today’s world is that you don’t really need, it helps, it’s nice to send a camera crew out and have great lighting and have everything’s very professionally produced. That’s nice and it definitely improves the quality of what you can make, but it’s expensive, it’s time consuming, it’s a much bigger ask for your client versus a, hey, can you record 30 seconds talking about the value that you’ve received from me versus can I send a camera crew to your home? That’s a much, or can we even say something up here in person at the office, if that’s the way it works. It’s a much bigger ask. I think today in general people are so accustomed to user-generated content even on TV. When my grandmother stayed with me during the pandemic and she would watch Good Morning America every day and it was striking just how much, even the anchors of the show sometimes we’re doing it from home and there’s all, everybody’s used to this sort of in the home spontaneous. Like just, I just turned on my camera and I’m just saying something and the templates that we have to serve to say, okay, let’s take that sort of raw asset and elevate it with a little bit of branding, a little bit of style, a little bit of production value so you have the best of both worlds where both can feel very authentic and just straight from the person, but you also dress it up a little bit so it feels like it’s not just a raw piece of video that got dropped somewhere. But it’s something that actually has a little bit of intention design and production quality behind it. So I think those are the two main things. Snippets right out of text, dropping them in, you can do that very quickly and easily. It’s a little bit more work to get those video testimonials, but putting those into a template and elevating just the visual of that is also pretty easy to do, assuming you can get that asset from clients in the first place. [SAM] Sounds great. So Nathan, if people wanted to get in touch with you or if they wanted to make use of Waymark services, what is the best way for them to do that? [NATHAN] We’re online at waymark.com and our site is open so you don’t have to, you can go play with it and get a feel for it without having to even create an account. You can just get started. Then I’m happy also to give a coupon code to listeners, which is something that they can take advantage of, basically just get a first month of our, we offer subscription service for small businesses. A lot of folks obviously are like, I want to try that first before I subscribe. So the coupon code just gives you that first month of the subscription service at no cost and you can go in there and make videos and download. But once you do download video content from our site, it is yours. You actually take possession of the file and then it’s yours to post on your website, on your Google My Business, on your Facebook or whatever the case may be. Key point there being, we as Waymark do not retain any rights or any control over what you can do with the content. So you’re not beholden to us long-term at all. [SAM] Okay, it’s good to know [NATHAN] Let me just grab this. I have a few different coupon codes that I can reference here, but let me figure out which one is the best one. Nevertheless, what the code will allow is for people to go to the site, make their first video and then with just a simple account and entering that code, they’ll have access to download that video at no cost. So it will be a totally free, no strings attached, initial video creation. Then obviously from our standpoint, we hope that folks convert to long-term subscribers and happy customers, but there won’t be any obligation for them to do that. [SAM] Great. That sounds amazing. So that coupon code will be in the show notes, so definitely go check that out if you’re interested on grabbing hold of that. Nathan, if every private practice owner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [NATHAN] Wow, that’s a great question. Well, I guess the thing that I’m very obsessed with these days is AI technology. For those that are not paying a lot of attention to it, there is really an incredible acceleration of progress happening right now in AI technology. So I would recommend that folks check out. Unfortunately, I don’t have any like silver bullet quick tips on what this means yet, because it’s happening so fast that I think the future is quite unpredictable, but I would recommend that folks go check out a couple different technologies, one in particular called GPT-3, by OpenAI, which is the name of the company. Or if you want to look at a big tech version there’s a project called Flamingo that comes out of the Deep Mind Group, which is within Google. Essentially what these new AI technologies have achieved is the ability to support a natural language interface with the computer, which basically means having a real conversation with the computer where it can actually understand you. That is new. It’s really just coming online but I think it may have profound consequences for a lot of different kinds of businesses. You can see some of the examples and with the OpenAI. You can even experience it if you just create an account. You can get in there and mess around with it a little bit. But I think over the next few years, we’re definitely headed for a world where Siri really works, where you can have a conversation with a sort of virtual assistant type of product and have it do real things for you, have it really understand what you need and actually deliver against those things. I wonder also what that could mean for any sort of, talk modality type of practice. I think we are still at decent ways, from the point where AI will be a full substitute for humans, but we’re definitely already entering the space where AI can be like 80%, 90% as good in many common scenarios. So I don’t know what that will mean, but I think probably the biggest heads up and most valuable heads up that I might be able to give practice owners is to start to think about that now, look into what the latest breakthroughs are in AI. If you’re not aware of them, you will be impressed, I can guarantee that. At a minimum it’s a fascinating technology space, but I do have a sense that this is going to become part of how people engage with all sorts of different types of services and any sort of psychological practice or service is a sensitive one. But the cost effectiveness and the accessibility of any sort of AI-based solution is such that for many people, it may be the only option, for many people, it may be a good hybrid option. So I don’t know where that’s headed, but I think it’s going to be headed for something that may be quite different from how things are today. That could happen in a not very long timeframe. [SAM] Well, that definitely leaves us with something to think about. Thanks so much for being such an awesome guest on the Marketing a Practice podcast. [NATHAN] Thank you, Sam. This is really fun. [SAM] Thanks again to Brighter Vision for sponsoring this episode. To get your first three months of website service, completely free head on to brightervision.com/joe. Thanks for listening to the Marketing a Practice podcast. If you need help with branding your business, whether it be a new logo, rebrand, or you simply want some print flyer designed head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. If you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. Finally, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on iTunes if you like what you’ve heard. Talk to you soon. Marketing a Practice podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic, Imperfect Thriving, or Faith in Practice, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.