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Hey folks. Welcome back to The Testing Psychologist podcast. Today’s topic is one that we have not talked about before. It’s a business episode, and we’re going to be talking about merging the StoryBrand marketing framework with video marketing.
My guest today, Orlando J Gomez, [00:01:00] is the founder of Video production company, Stellar Lense Productions. It’s a video strategy expert company specializing in visual storytelling for business. Orlando has worked with companies like Uber, Baskin-Robbins, Dove, Samsung, as well as hundreds of small businesses across America to create video campaigns as engaging as your favorite Netflix shows.
He oversees both Stellar Lense Productions which is a production company for fully customized business and brand-building videos, as well as COOPT, an online video marketplace that makes high-quality video marketing accessible and easy for any local business. Both companies bring the storytelling approach Orlando is known for and that has been able to better establish local and national brands and their messaging, ultimately leading to a higher ROI, brand awareness, and overall success.
He’s been doing [00:02:00] this for a long time. He is a true expert in this space, and I think that will come through during our conversation. He makes two potentially complex topics pretty digestible from my standpoint. So if you’ve thought about doing video, you’ve heard you should be doing video, and you want to maybe dip your toe in and find a way to bring video marketing to your practice using a proven framework and the StoryBrand approach, this is the episode for you.
Without further ado, let’s get to my conversation with Orlando Gomez.
Hey Orlando, welcome to the podcast.
[00:03:00] Gomez: Hey, Dr. Jeremy. Thank you. Appreciate it. Glad to be here.Dr. Sharp: I’m glad to have you here. You are I would say a unique guest on my list of guests. Certainly, I have not talked with anyone who specializes in video, and certainly, no one who combines that with StoryBrand. So I’m really excited to chat with you and have this conversation. I think the audience is probably excited to hear what we have to say as well. So thanks for being here.
Gomez: Of course. My pleasure.
Dr. Sharp: I will lead with the question that I always lead with, which is, of all the things you could spend your time and energy doing, why this? Why is this important to you?
Gomez: For me, video and visual storytelling has just always been a part of my DNA, just from a child. I always joke that I quickly learned that I was not cut out for sports. I did not have the physique, the [00:04:00] body, and the discipline for it. So I found my way in the arts and then in acting, and subsequently in video production.
There’s just always been something about this idea of telling stories and of creating something out of nothing that didn’t exist before. And then just as it evolved, getting to be able to move people, the psychology of it and how ideas translate to the screen and how those screen translates to people’s minds and how we can get people where we want them to be. I don’t know. It’s fascinating. There’s so many different components to it. I just absolutely love it and I am fortunate enough to… I’ve been able to tune into that early in life and then immediately leverage it. Right after I got out of high school, I started a business and I’ve been doing that ever since.
Dr. Sharp: You’re right on. We’re going to talk about some of these aspects [00:05:00] of video and marketing, of course, but there’s so much psychology that goes into it in the way that shots are framed, the scripting, and just the light, everything. I’m so fascinated with all of this and excited to dig into it. It’s very cool.
Gomez: Absolutely.
Dr. Sharp: Well, a big part of our conversation is the StoryBrand framework, so I thought we might start there. I’ve talked about StoryBrand a lot on the podcast, mainly in passing. As an advocate, I really believe in it as a strategy and a framework, but I would love to hear from you as an expert. How would you describe the StoryBrand framework?
Gomez: StoryBrand framework for me personally, it’s fantastic because I feel like it gives a clear language to something that I’ve intrinsically known for a long time or discovered on [00:06:00] my own through my video production career and experience. But it was funny because the way I was turned onto it, in the same week, probably about 2 or 3 days apart, both my dad and my wife told me that they just got done reading a book by this guy named Donald Miller called Building a StoryBrand and that I really need to check it out because he sounds like me. The idea is that he’s conveying, the things that he’s saying, it sounded like the stuff that I’ve been harping about my whole life.
So literally within 2 or 3 days, they both read it independently, my wife for fun and my dad for work. She’s like, okay, I guess I gotta check this thing out. So on a trip up to the bay for a shoot, I downloaded the audiobook and I listened to it up there and back and I was like, no kidding. He’s literally saying the things that I have always been telling my clients, but he’s saying it in a way that is much more clear, makes more sense, and [00:07:00] with so much authority.
I was immediately hooked. When I got back, I went online. I started doing research on him on StoryBrand and all of that and found my way to their certification program. I applied for certification. I got accepted within two months, and I’ve been a guide now, I think this is my third year, going on for three years now.
Dr. Sharp: And if you had to go back and just describe at the most basic level what StoryBrand is, what would you describe it as? Is it a marketing framework? Is it a storytelling framework? For folks who have no idea what we’re talking about, how would you describe it?
Gomez: Got it. It’s definitely a marketing framework. It’s a way to position your marketing, I guess that’s your branding, in a way that connects with your audience and makes it very clear as to who you are, and what you do. The [00:08:00] core of it all is inviting your customer into a story. Once your customer is in that story loop, it’s hard for them to pull away. They connect more deeply, and they tend to be a lot more engaged. So, it’s the idea of leveraging storytelling techniques.
Storytelling goes back to the beginning of mankind, right? We’ve been telling stories in one medium or another forever. And so, it’s leveraging that in a way that’s going to better connect with your customer and ultimately drive sales, drive business.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. Cool. Thanks for laying some groundwork. If I’m remembering right, I’m sure I’m going to make all sorts of mistakes as we talk about this, but StoryBrand really relies on this concept of the hero’s journey. Is that right?
Gomez: Yes.
Dr. Sharp: And inviting people into that to be the hero of their [00:09:00] own story.
Gomez: Yeah. It’s a really cool concept that I think to a certain extent we intrinsically get but he so beautifully puts it out there in a way that, again, is clear and makes a whole lot of sense. And it’s this idea that we don’t want to be the hero. We want to be the guide to the hero. In every great story, you have your heroes and villains but then you also will often have a guide or a mentor for the hero.
The example he uses is, Luke Skywalker can’t just go and fight Darth Vader and win on his own. He’s got to learn, he’s got to grow, and he’s got to have a mentor in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. Those people give him the tools that he needs and the insights he needs to become the hero to save the day.
And so, heroes aren’t looking for other heroes, but heroes are looking for guides to help them along their [00:10:00] hero’s journey. So as marketers, as business owners, anytime you’re putting your marketing foot forward, you want to do that in a way that positions you as the guide to help the hero win the day.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. I think we’re going to spend some time on that throughout the conversation because I think a lot of us as mental health professionals, and psychologists, we tend to position ourselves or try to position ourselves as the hero in the story, as the expert, the one who’s doing everything, engineering the whole process. And that’s a big mistake that we make and something that turns people off because it doesn’t give them the opportunity to be the hero in their own journey or their kids’ journey, right?
Gomez: Right. I think the subtext of that, Donald doesn’t really get into this, but [00:11:00] again, the subtext of it is when you position yourself as a hero, what does that say about your customer? Well, then they must be the victim, right? Or they must be the one in distress who can’t save themselves. You know what I mean? You unintentionally create this negative persona of who your customer or your client is, and whether they immediately get that on the surface or not.
Again, marketing, especially in video, it’s very psychology driven and there’s a lot of things that happen in people’s minds, whether they’re aware of it or not. And so we have to be very intentional with the words we use, the imagery we show, the things we say, how we position things because there’s a lot going on under the hood beyond just what’s on the surface.
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. Yes. So we’ve laid a little groundwork for StoryBrand. I’d love to switch over to the other side of this [00:12:00] conversation and just talk about video: basics of video and why we should be considering video in general. Forget StoryBrand, but why should we even consider video as a means of marketing our practices?
Gomez: Absolutely. I think on the practical level, it’s where everything is at these days. The algorithms prefer video over photo, over copy. People tend to prefer by a large margin to watch content over reading content. Take that for what it is, we can argue the merits of that, but the reality is, that’s how people consume new information. People are consuming information dramatically more through video than through written copy. And so just practically speaking, if you want to get in front of people and you want to meet people where they are, then you have to go to them in the way that they’re used to consuming their media. [00:13:00] So, there’s that aspect.
But even beyond that, and what I had always been pushing and what the industry has always been pushing for for years prior is just the fact that video connects deeply in a way that texts just can’t. I mean, unless you have a great imagination and you love reading and you’re that person, and you can really envision what’s going on, the fact that video is multimedium, you have visuals, you have audio, you have since sometimes graphics with text, there are all these different things going on. You’re stimulating the viewer in a way that just plain text can’t do.
The old adage just is that a picture’s worth a thousand words. Well, video is 24 or 30 photos per second, depending on your [00:14:00] frame rate. I can nerd out. So what is that worth? When you do that across 30 seconds and just again, storytelling loops and being able to present information in a way that is also a very inferred. Video is a highly inference-based medium. You don’t have to spell everything out. People can make those connections on their own. Viewers are very smart whether they realize it or not. And when you understand that and you work within that mindset and that framework, you can convey so much more information in a lot less time, and connect more deeply, resonate more deeply, and it becomes more memorable.
Dr. Sharp: I am right with you. It fits with neuropsychology as well, right? As psychologists who specialize in testing, we deal with this stuff a lot. But the visual system [00:15:00] is a really strong system. Just evolutionarily, it’s something that we should be capitalizing on because that’s one of the almost survival mechanisms for humans is to be very visually tuned in and it just makes sense.
Gomez: Absolutely. Just to be clear, talking about this stuff with you is intimidating because I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a brain guy. I understand it on a creative level, just out of necessity and learning my craft, but I appreciate that… I think you probably, and your audience understands this to a greater capacity than I ever will, but there is truth in that. It’s more than just the sum of its parts. It’s more than just light and sound and text. There’s so much more happening. And the more you can leverage that and understand that, the better it’s going to be.
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. [00:16:00] And for the record, that feeling is totally mutual. You’ve got the creative side of things. So I feel like I’m totally out of my depth with all of that, but at least from the brain side, the short story is just visual stuff is really compelling for humans, and we’re going to capitalize on that through video marketing. It’s really exciting.
So, we’ve got video. The benefits of video are there. Honestly, it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around it because I think I’m one of those folks in the minority who would prefer to read versus watch because I think video is too slow most of the time. I always watch videos on 2x speed and I’m just trying to take in.
Gomez: I was just going to say that.
Dr. Sharp: But what’s important to hear is that the vast majority of people actually prefer video. And clearly, I think social media is a testament to that. [00:17:00] Everything is reels and photos. That’s just what we’re doing these days. So it’s important to highlight that.
Gomez: Absolutely. Social media has definitely changed a number of things. One is just the way we consume information and the pace at which we consume.
One of the things that’s hard to compete with and hard to adapt to is like you said, it’s that pace. Because of things like TikTok and reels, people’s attention span is dramatically shorter, and your time interval for hooking people, it used to be like 5 to 10 seconds, you get 5 to 10 seconds on your video to really hook someone, and you have the remaining 20 seconds, if we’re talking about the traditional 30-second broadcast ad, to then sell them or push them to do something and they’re called to action. Now it’s like, you got two seconds. Those first two seconds, if they’re not immediately [00:18:00] connected and interested in what you’re saying or what they’re seeing, they swipe and they’re gone, and it’s lost. So, it’s very interesting. But once you do hook them, they tend to stick around.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. It’s good to hear. I’ve noticed that. I have kids who are 10 and 11, and the speed that they scroll through videos is terrifying. I’ve pulled myself off of social media for the most part, especially reels, TikTok and Instagram, but that was true for me too, and it’s also terrifying just to see. I think you’re exactly right that if something is not immediately compelling, we’ve gotten used to the idea that we can just watch something else. That puts a lot of pressure, I think
Gomez: Absolutely. Personally, if it wasn’t so important to my craft in my industry, I [00:19:00] wouldn’t do social media either. I’m a traditionalist. When it comes to media, I like a slow burn. I like really developing a story and really sinking into it. And that’s not the case for social media. Going off on a tangent here, but even with YouTube, when YouTube first started, I was making content for the internet before YouTube was around, and when YouTube came out, you started pouring all my content over and we did very well in the beginning, but then just that whole pace. People want things quicker, want things shorter, want things more snappy. It just wasn’t my storytelling forte and it wasn’t my preference. And so I had to pull away. I stopped doing YouTube after probably three years of YouTube being out there.
And now, it’s that to an extreme, right? Now you’re like, not even 30 seconds, it’s not even [00:20:00] 15 seconds. It’s really five seconds. 5 to 15 seconds is your window. But again, from a business standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, that’s just where people are. And so we can either have a fit and, and sit back and say, I’m not going to do that, not play in that field and lose out on the market share, or you just adapt and you learn to create within those new paradigms. That’s what we have to do.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. I wonder, we’re going to get to practical stuff here very soon, but the philosophical part is really interesting to me. Having been in the industry for so long, do you see us going back ever? Do you see this pace slowing down at any point and having a rebound where we do go back to a slower pace?
Gomez: I want to say [00:21:00] we have to. I think at some point we have to, otherwise, everything just becomes way too shallow and we can never really make any deep, meaningful connection. But I don’t know. I was just watching something about this the other day, just the whole AI landscape also changes everything, right?
Dr. Sharp: Sure.
Gomez: I was watching someone talking about how there are YouTube channels that is 100% AI-generated. They use one AI bot like ChatGPT to write a script and they’ll use another bot to read that script. And then they’ll have another bot that pulls relevant stock footage off the internet to match that script and then a bot to auto-upload that to YouTube.
It’s mind-blowing. On one hand, it’s really cool but’s also really scary. And it’s also like, what happens to the substance of that [00:22:00] communication, and what happens to that human interaction? Well, there is no human interaction because there’s no human there, but you know what I mean?
Philosophically, it’s a jungle. I would hope that we could eventually get it away from that and get back into a longer format, but should people be perfectly honest, I think even now that still has its place because there are still very well done, very captivating, very successful what we would call long format video marketing where someone basically makes a short film, right? It’s like a 3 to 5-minute ad that is a true story arc. And a lot of those get really big. They go viral and they do really well, but they also tend to be really expensive because now you’re doing a large-scale production.
I think it’s hand in hand. I think you need to have that quick, catchy, the stuff that people are used to seeing just to grab their attention, break them out of the, [00:23:00] we call it stopping the scroll, right? We don’t want them to scroll anymore. We don’t want them to swipe anymore. Pay attention. Once they pay attention, then you can bring them over into your controlled space of your website, then you can have your longer-form content there. There you can have the deep dives and you can talk at a longer length about whatever that topic may be, whether it’s your business or whatever. Customer success stories. And then people will listen, but they have to know that they want to hear from you first before they’ll give you that time.
Dr. Sharp: It’s a good way to put it.
Gomez: Think of your own spinning. I do this all the time and I hope it’s not just me. If I come across a product or service that, oh, that seems interesting, and they hook me, I’ll go and I’ll start exploring. Now, I’ll watch the product review. I’ll watch [00:24:00] the tutorials. I’ll watch how does it work. You know what I mean? I’ll consume more and more information and I don’t care that it’s 5, 10, or 15 minutes long because I’m already interested. But you got to get somebody there first, and in order to get them there first, you have to be able to do the scroll stop being quick, kind of gotcha content, unfortunately.
Dr. Sharp: Right. That’s fair. Well, let’s say folks are listening, I hope folks are still listening, and they’re like, StoryBrand sounds great, video sounds great, I have no idea what to do next. So where would we even start as mental health professionals wanting to do a little video marketing?
Gomez: The easiest way to get started, I would say, is just to get started in one way or another. The great thing about when your business is you, so you are the thing you’re [00:25:00] selling so to speak, or your expertise and thing you’re selling, it’s okay for you to be the person in front of the camera, wing it, so to speak, even if it’s just on your phone, low production value, it’s fine because really what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that human connection. I am the person. You see me, I’m the person you’ll be meeting with. I’m the person you’ll be talking with. You start to develop that relationship by proxy, but it’s still you, right? And so, it humanizes your business. They can connect with you that way and you start the process there.
So, if you’re a brand or you’re selling a product, generally you don’t want to do that. You want to make sure your production value is good and the storytelling baked in and all that, just so people can trust this entity, right? But again, when it’s [00:26:00] you, the practitioner, you don’t have to worry about that. So, I would say first things first, just introduce yourself to people. Let people know who you are. Let people see you. Let them know that you’re human, that they can trust you, that they can see your personality.
And that’s a whole other thing too that we get into. You’re not for everybody, right? When you are the person, when you’re the practitioner, you’re the one that they’re working with. Personality is a big deal. You want to attract people to you who like your style, like your personality, like you for who you are, and trust you for who you are.
So when you go and do that, don’t try to imitate somebody else. Don’t try to be this thing that you see other people being successful with. You’ve got to be you. If you are going to be in front of the camera, you have to be authentic. How you are on camera has to be how you’re going to be in person.[00:27:00] Otherwise, your customer’s going to feel like they got got, right? Like, hey, this isn’t who I thought you were, and now they’re going to be… defenses are going to go up and you’re not going to be able to have the rapport and the success that you thought you were going to have.
And the great thing about that too is, you’re going to turn some people off. People who don’t like the way you look, don’t like the way you dress, don’t like the way you talk, don’t like your pace, don’t like your tone. Whatever. Fine. Who cares? We’re not for everybody, and nor can you serve everybody, right? So, you might as well connect with the people who have an affinity towards you, who are naturally drawn to you for whatever those reasons may be, good or bad or indifferent. But at least from a business standpoint, you’re going to have much more success that way.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense. Be authentic. It seems like that’s [00:28:00] the way to go. I imagine people have a hard time with that, especially on camera thinking they, […]
Gomez: Especially on camera. And I’ll be honest, even for myself, that was hard. When I started doing podcasts, started doing things like that, in the beginning, I found myself regurgitating the words and the clips and the things of the people that I looked up to. The people that were my heroes in the marketing space.
I quickly learned, I just stop. Who cares? I’m not them. I’m not Donald Miller. I’m not Christo. I’m not these people. I’m me and people love me for who I am and people hate me for who I am and I can’t help. But who cares. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to work with the people I like to work with and who like working with me and it’s great. There’s plenty to go around. So when you put yourself out there, authenticity is paramount, especially on [00:29:00] video.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. We talk about that a lot in our web copy, bio, and print. I feel like that comes up a lot and it’s a great message for anyone to take away independent of anything else we talk about. It’s okay to turn some people off. You should not be a great fit for everybody.
Gomez: 100%.
Dr. Sharp: And video exponentially multiplies that because it is in some ways the most vulnerable marketing because you are putting everything out there for people to judge and or connect with.
Gomez: There’s nothing to hide behind, right? With your copy, at least it’s faceless. It’s just text. It could be your words, but it’s on paper. When it’s you in front of a camera, there’s nowhere to hide.
Dr. Sharp: Exactly. So, let’s get real concrete. So you said that folks should just maybe even pull out their phone and introduce themselves. [00:30:00] So as psychologists, I know there are people out there who are like, what do I say? And then what do I do with it? Where does that video go? And does the phone need to have a tripod? Do we need to have a microphone? I know these questions are running through people’s minds, so let’s get super concrete with it. What do you say? Where do you put it? All that stuff.
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[00:31:00]All right, let’s get back to the podcast.Gomez: Well, to start, put it on your social media feed. Have a professional Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Start there. That’s a great place to start. And just hold the phone in front of you, your typical selfie video, and start there. You can get lights, you can get a tripod, you can get a mic, you get all that stuff down the road, but at the very least, get comfortable talking to a camera. It’s daunting. You look at the lens and it’s dead. It said it’s a dead eye. It’s an eyeball that’s looking back at you. It doesn’t blink. That has no soul behind it. It’s just this empty piece of glass watching every move. It can be awkward. So you get comfortable with that.
But in terms of what to say, again, coming back from the authenticity, talk about the things that are important to you? The things that you’re most passionate [00:32:00] about are always the easiest to talk about. If you go back to the basics, why did you get into your field in the first place? What was the draw? What was the thing you were wanting to help people with? What is the one practice technique that you’re really passionate about you wish more people would be doing these things? Start from the basics- the things you know. You don’t have to go beyond that.
The more value you can offer, we talk about give things away. Give away knowledge, give away insight, give away tips, give away information is very valuable. Information is key. And it’s something that doesn’t necessarily cost you to give, right? So all these tips and tricks and how-tos and[00:33:00] why we do these things or what does this mean? Or if you’re struggling with this, here’s two things you could try to do to see if this helps somebody. Whatever. Talk about anything.
All those things are, if I feel like I’m receiving knowledge, I’m learning from you, I feel valued. I feel:
1) You care.
2) Clearly, you’re an expert. You have insight.
3) I’m probably gonna follow you because I’m going to want to hear more. I’m going to want to learn more.
And it becomes part of a whole other thing. It’s a nurturing campaign. You’re hoping that people will like what you have to say, they’ll like you, they’ll like your expertise, they’ll follow you and eventually, maybe one day they might actually need you, right? Not everybody is a sale to be made now. Most people are not. I think the [00:34:00] current statistic with marketing is like 4% of people that you market to need your services right now, 96% of people will need your services down the road, so you want to build a community, build followers, build trust, build your brand, build yourself up as the expert so that when they need you, they come to you. And that’s part of it.
Dr. Sharp: I think that’s part of the challenge with this kind of marketing and a lot of marketing strategies actually, is that it is pretty rare people are often looking for a quick fix, right? Like, I want to capture those folks who are ready to buy now. And I guess there are means to do that, but it sounds like you’re saying that you look at video as a more long-term strategy. Is that fair?
Gomez: Yeah, it’s both because you do still want to capture those 4% even when they’re [00:35:00] ready. But yeah, it is having this mindset that you’re not going to throw a video up, and all of a sudden your roster’s going to be full and you have more business than you could do with. It will take time. It’s a slow build. And the more you can have that mindset, the better off you’re going to be. But we do have immediate conversions. If you do it right, you’ll have both. You’ll find the people who need you now, you convert them, but then the content will be so compelling that those who don’t need you, at least they’ll follow you, they’ll stay connected with you, or they won’t skip your video the next time. So it’s a little bit of a bubble.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. Thanks for clarifying. So, we got our first video. I’m going to stick with my concrete approach here. We’ve got our first video. We’ve introduced ourselves. We’ve shared some [00:36:00] tips and tricks. It’s on social media. So then what’s the strategy from there? I mean, there are higher levels of video marketing. I’m wondering, what if somebody’s mastered the social media thing somehow, that feels very foreign to me, but I’m sure somebody will do it. Where do you go from there and what are the other options for doing video?
Gomez: I used to ease into this one. One of the big things that we do with most industries, and I know it’s a little different when you get into the medical space, and we talked about this before specifically with the psychology space, being able to get some testimonial client feedback kind of stuff is incredibly valuable in every industry.
Now, I ended up going into doing that research, [00:37:00] and so from what I could tell, you’re right. In the psychology space, you cannot solicit a testimonial. In the psychiatric space you can, depending on the state regulatory boards or whatever. Again, I’m not the expert in all of that, but getting somebody else to talk on your behalf is incredibly valuable. And now in the cases where you can’t have your customer or your client speak for you, you can get a colleague to speak for you, right? You can get I guess it depends on the state. You can get a little gray, you get a family member to speak on things. Anytime you can get…
There’s just something about it. I think we all intrinsically feel that too. We don’t like going out and saying, you just start listing off of all of our accolades and this is why I’m so great because of X, Y, Z, but [00:38:00] we don’t mind somebody else saying it about us. And we don’t like standing in front of somebody who’s all just spouting off their resume and how great they are, but we don’t mind them standing next to somebody who’s singing their praises. For whatever reason, that’s just how we are. So, those kinds of videos are just a wealth of value. And again, I think, it can be a little tricky in very specific medical fields.
Dr. Sharp: It’s nice to hear that alternative though. I don’t know that I necessarily would’ve thought to have video testimonials from colleagues or family, but I think it is the next best thing for us. That’s the best we can do.
Gomez: Absolutely. For whatever reason, I do a lot of work in the dental space and we do a ton of these client testimonial kind of videos. [00:39:00] But what’s really funny is part of what we’ve seen has been really successful is we actually will interview the staff. So, we’ll interview the hygienist, we’ll interview the person at the front desk who’s answering phones, we interview the person who’s working in the back office and we just ask them, what is it like working with doctors so and so, and why do you come to work every day? What gets you out of bed?
And they get to talk about things like passion, the company culture, and how they really care. And so they get to say these things for you that hold a lot of value. And when you can see as a viewer, the staff genuinely singing the praise and showing that they care and that clearly their boss cares about them, you know that that’s going to translate to you as a [00:40:00] patient or as a customer, right? Because if they’re going to take care of their staff, they’re going to take care of me, right? And so that kind of stuff translates really well. And we’ve seen incredible success in that space.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. So that opens a door to the possibility of a more structured video shoot maybe is the right term. That feels like another step up, and I’m sure there are a number of practices out there that might be interested in something like that, really going all in and having that set up. So could you talk about what that looks like if we wanted to go that route?
Gomez: Absolutely. That’s a nice easy next step because now you’re starting to get into proper production. You’re going to have a production company out there, a crew setting up lights and microphones and multiple cameras and things like that.[00:41:00] But it’s not as taxing. You schedule time for them to come in.
For us, what we normally do is we will pick a day that the office is closed and let the business owner decide. And then we have them schedule a number of interviews. Again, depending on what we’re trying to say, what we want to get out of the interviews, and what the goal is for that video, we’ll ask them for very specific people, can you get a customer who could speak on this thing? Can you get a colleague who could speak about this? What staff members have an experience pertaining to this thing whatever it may be?
And again, getting ahead of myself. That’ll all come out of our discovery call. So we first would want to know, why are we making this video in the first place? What’s the goal here? What do you want hoping to accomplish from this video? Because again, we don’t want to make a video for the sake of making a video. We want it to drive a specific action. And so once we know [00:42:00] what that is, we’ll know more or less the types of questions we need to ask, to whom we need to ask them so we can get the outcomes we want in the video, which will hopefully drive the outcomes we want for your business, right?
So we basically ask people to commit to an 8-hour day. It’s going to be a workday on a day off, but try to make an event out of it. Have staff come in, and buy lunch for everybody. It’s going to be really chill. It’s going to be a lot of downtimes as we sift through the different interviews, but it ends up working to be a nice little community-building event type of thing. And then we just shoot all the interviews in one afternoon, we will then spend another couple hours just getting, what we call B-roll, the random cutaway footage of the office, of the staff working, and whatever it may be. And then we go back in and edit it all together.
The great thing about these kinds of [00:43:00] things is you can pull multiple videos out of a single shoot. If we schedule it right and we plan it right, we can actually produce 3, 4, 5 videos from a single 8-hour day shoot rather than putting all that money in time and then you get one video out of it. That just comes down to the planning.
Dr. Sharp: Right. Well, I think that’s reassuring, it is for me at least, to know that a production company, you would walk us through the whole process. I think a lot of people in our space don’t really think about doing this. This isn’t really normal. We need some handholding through the whole process. And that we would script it, there’s a discovery call, and you would guide us a bit.
Gomez: Yeah. Absolutely. That’s absolutely our function. Any good production company or marketing company is going to do that same thing, right? The only red [00:44:00] flag I would ever give somebody is if you go to hire someone and they’re like, when can we come over and shoot? I don’t know. Next Thursday. Cool, we’ll be there. And that’s the extent of your planning. That’s a problem. But most of the time, the company is going to want to spend that time to get to know you, your goals, what you want out of the video, and then what do we have to ask- the question we have to ask to produce that outcome?
Dr. Sharp: Great. We talked a little bit about the platform, we talked about social media, a lot of folks talk about putting videos on your website. I wonder what you have to say about that and if there are other platforms that these videos might go to to get the most bang for our buck.
Gomez: Yeah, definitely put videos on your website. Probably not the selfie videos that you started with, [00:45:00] that we were talking about before. You’re going to want your website to be a little bit more professional and clean and look like it’s well-developed, but those testimonial videos, if you have an explainer video. We call them walkthrough videos or guide videos where it could be you in a proper interview setting, with some good production value and you just walk through the process. This is what you can expect when you come in. This is going to happen and then this, and then we’re going to do this. That kind of stuff is great. That’s gold.
Again, you got to remember if people are on your website, those are the people who are probably looking to buy or looking to work with you, to hire you. If you’re finding them out in the social media space, not necessarily in a place to want to make a purchasing decision or to move forward with your services, but if they’re on your website, there is a level of [00:46:00] interest. They’re actively looking. So that’s where you want to have that deeper, more meaty video content, copy, and photos. You want that to be very professional. You want that to be very clean.
If social media is about being the authentic you; and getting to see you, who you really are, the website is now your place of business where you want to make sure your business looks like the quality that it is. You don’t want people to go to your website and you have this really low, just cheap-looking stock photos and videos and things like that. You don’t want that mental disconnect.
Dr. Sharp: A good way to put it. You talk about content on the website being really good. I wonder if this is a time that we could pull in some of that StoryBrand influence and talk about [00:47:00] how we might generate content; what kind of content makes the most sense if we’re trying to connect with our clients?
Gomez: Yeah. I think especially relating to StoryBrand being in medical, healthcare industry, it’s a lot easier because again, you’re wanting to show people that they can’t achieve what they’re looking for, and typically people are going to be a lot more aware of what they’re needing or what they’re current hurdles are. They may not know what the solution is, but they’re more than likely be able to pick it out when it shows up in front of them. So if you offer a solution, if you offer, hey, if this is what you’re dealing with, if this is what you’re struggling with, here are some things we can do. They’ll get that. And that’s truly being the guide, [00:48:00] right?
It’s, we see you where you are, how you are, it’s okay. We understand. It doesn’t have to be that way. And we can show how you can overcome and how you can be better, how you can have the life that you’re looking for. And that’s being the guide. And so, I think the more empathetic you can be, the more you can specifically identify the potential problems, or the potential hurdles that and struggles that people are dealing with, and call them out by name, those issues, and then give a very clear this is what we do to overcome that, you can’t lose with that.
Dr. Sharp: I’d love to go back and just repeat that. I’m guessing for you, this is just a throwaway explanation, but that’s super powerful just to [00:49:00] distill it down to something as simple as like, we see you, we get what you’re going through. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can help and here’s how. That’s a nice simple formula for the message and the content you might create.
Gomez: 100%. And that is the StoryBrand model, the brand framework, right? It’s identify a problem, acknowledge the problem, empathize with the position that the person’s in, offer a solution, and then give a clear call to action of how to get to that solution. That’s the framework. And then again, if you want to look at it from a storytelling standpoint, that’s also a great story loop, right? Hero has a problem. Hero gets a solution. Hero overcomes problem, that truly becomes the hero, right? And so that’s what you want to present.
Dr. Sharp: Right. [00:50:00] Yeah. I think we complicate things a lot, especially in our field, I’m sure you see this in other fields, but anything medical, mental health-wise, there’s a lot of room for jargon, industry speak, and over-explaining. We get into this a lot when I’m just talking generally about marketing with my consulting clients. It’s like, make it as simple as humanly possible and then maybe go like one click up from that if you really need to, and it goes
Gomez: 100%. No, it’s funny that you bring it up. You shock my memory around some stuff, but yeah, the idea is you want to present at a 3rd-grade level, right? You want to have that position with your language. You don’t want to do insider language, you don’t want to do industry speak. And now something that was hard even for myself in the marketing space, in the video production space, [00:51:00] it’s very easy to get super hyper-technical and it becomes so normal because you’re interacting with that on a daily basis, that you just use these words and then the person you’re talking to is like, what does that mean? Like, oh, that’s right. You’ve never heard that phrase before. Let me break that down for you.
But the problem is in marketing, when you’re putting content out there, you don’t have that opportunity to clarify. You don’t get to see them go, what does that mean? And then clarify. So you need to do the clarification upfront.
I had this client, they were a big cancer screening company. They wanted to do a rebrand because they were changing their logo and some other stuff, and they wanted do some content for it. I went to the website and I was like, guys, I have no idea what you do, how you do it, why you do. [00:52:00] I feel like I need to have a science degree just to understand what you’re saying. This website is supposed to be client-facing. This isn’t for other doctors. This is for your customers. It’s the general public. So the general public’s not going to understand a quarter of what you’re saying. We need to completely overhaul your language here.
And their whole pushback is, but everybody knows what this is or does that, this is part of the… like yeah, everybody in your industry knows that. I don’t know that. And if you want me to buy your product or use you as my service provider, I need to know what the heck you’re talking about. So yeah, 100% got to lose the insider language, got to lose the technical speak. And again, coming back to what we said before, you got to meet people where they are and talk to them a way [00:53:00] that they understand, that it’s clear, not confusing, and you’ll have a lot more luck that way.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. So we’re touching on, I think, some of the mistakes that we might make in our marketing and ways that we miss the Mark a little bit. Are there other common mistakes you see with folks who are trying to do video and why they may not land the way that we want them to?
Gomez: There’s two things: One, don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t try to be overly creative. Don’t sacrifice your message for the creative. I love doing comedy videos. I love doing outside-the-box type stuff, but we have to always make sure we frame it in the context of, is this pushing people towards the result we want. Or are we just trying to be [00:54:00] funny for the sake of being funny? Because that’s not going to do justice for the client. We could tell good jokes and people get a laugh, but if it doesn’t serve the larger narrative and the larger point of what we’re doing, you’re wasting time, wasting money.
So, you don’t want to be overly cutey and clever with your marketing if it’s going to sacrifice the clarity of your message. It could seem counterintuitive coming from someone who’s job is to create something creative and engaging, but it’s true. At the end of the day, video is a tool. And if you don’t use the tool correctly, it doesn’t matter how shiny it is, it doesn’t matter how cool or fancy it is. If it doesn’t do the job, what’s the point? It’s a waste of investment. So don’t overcomplicate it. Make sure your message is clear and concise. [00:55:00] But on the flip side, don’t be overly stuffy about it, and don’t just keep saying the same thing everybody else says. You do got to have to try to find your voice in who you are, coming back to the authenticity and let that shine.
Dr. Sharp: I love that. That may be a nice note to end on. Authenticity and letting ourselves shine. That’s a very hopeful message.
This has been good. I really appreciate you talking through all of this, and merging these two topics of StoryBrand and video. I know there’s so much more that we could say on both of those topics, but hopefully, folks are feeling less intimidated and a little more empowered to think about doing video in their practice. I think there’s a lot of room to do so. Super grateful for you. Thanks for being here.
Gomez: No, of course. My pleasure. [00:56:00] For you listeners want to check us out, stellarlenseproductions.com is my company. We do have an offer right now for podcast listeners. They go to stellarlenseproductions.com/strategy. We’re actually offering a free video marketing strategy session. So we do like we talked about earlier on, which is just get to know who they are, their message, and help figure out how they should be positioning themselves in the video space, then we just give advice, this is what I would do, this is our recommendations. You don’t have to take it or leave it. You could use us, not use us, use somebody else, but that information’s yours. And if they choose to work with us, we’ll take $1000 off any service that they contract us for.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s awesome. We’ll definitely have that link in the show notes. And it generates a follow-up question for me that might be super naive, but just to confirm that if folks wanted to work with you, I am guessing you will travel around the country or are you only local?
[00:57:00] Gomez: No, we’re all over the country.Dr. Sharp: Great. It’s an awesome service that I’ve thought about many times to do in our practice and just have never pulled the trigger. This helps to demystify it and push in that direction.
Gomez: It’s daunting at first, and I think it’s one of those things where, like anything else, the more you do it, the more reps you get, the more familiar and comfortable and it just gets to be a whole lot easier. But at the very least, just start putting yourself out there, selfie videos, nothing wrong with it. Let people see who you are and let that personality come through.
Dr. Sharp: Love it. Well, thanks again Orlando. It was great to connect.
Gomez: Likewise. Thanks again.
Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so [00:58:00] make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast.
And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here, and similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your needs.