Rx Catering: A Long-Term Case Study on Video Marketing (Week 3)
Things are looking good at Rx Catering!
Cheron’s cooking show is generating lots of great comments on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
Her LinkedIn company page is picking up followers and her YouTube channel is picking up subscribers every day.
The Other Side of Success
With success comes haters.
That’s just an unfortunate truth that you should prepare yourself for.
The haters are already showing up after just two weeks of Cheron’s cooking show being published.
I’m sharing this so you can prepare yourself for it. With video marketing, by definition, you are making yourself more visible.
Everybody’s going to see you elevating your brand and everybody is not going to be happy for you. Some people will want to claim credit for your success. Some people will try to attach themselves to your success. Some people will just be mad that you’re succeeding.
So don’t be surprised if you hear from someone who you haven’t heard from in forever and the interaction leaves you wondering “what was that all about?”
While you’re hard at work, focusing on growing your business, people you know will be hard at work focusing on either being jealous or trying to figure out how to attach themselves to what they see you doing.
I’ve seen this happen enough times with people I’ve worked with to know it’s a thing. Prepare yourself for it.
As you become more successful, you’re going to have to change who you hang around and who you allow to have access to you. And, as I share in this video, that’s actually a good thing.
One Video Per Week
The original plan for Rx Catering was to publish a five day per week cooking show for at least one month in order to build awareness and really build a buzz, and then dial it back to once per week.
Turns out it only took one week to build the buzz we were looking for, so we’ve already transitioned to once a week publishing.
This moves Cheron one step closer to the next stage of the marketing plan, which is creating an email list and sending out a weekly email blast.
The Email List
This is the long game for Rx Catering.
Cheron is a busy business owner and the most efficient way for her to stay in front of her target audience is through an email list.
With email, there is no algorithm standing between Cheron and her audience. She gets to put herself directly into inboxes, which is the most valuable form of access that the internet affords.
And her cooking show is what’s going to earn her that access.
The Blog
All roads lead to the blog…which sits on the Rx Catering website.
Or at least, it will.
Once we set it up, Cheron’s blog is going to become the primary publishing platform for her cooking show.
The goal is to use her cooking show to attract people to her blog where she can make it easy for them to join her email list.
Cheron will email each week’s cooking show (which is embedded in a blog post) to her email subscribers. Clicking the cooking show link will bring people to a blog post where she presents that week’s cooking show, as well as any other information she wants to present.
The whole purpose of the cooking show is to generate catering orders. By publishing the cooking show through her blog, Cheron will be bringing people to her website, which is where they can also place their catering orders.
You’ll have to forgive the kindergarten drawing. That’s just how I sketch out my ideas before implementing them.
Here’s a sneak peek, by the way, at the drawings for the forthcoming Rx Catering website redesign.
YouTube Is The Bridge, Not The Destination
Something that many people getting started with video make a mistake with is focusing on growing their YouTube channel.
If your goal is to be a YouTuber, then growing your YouTube channel should be your goal.
But if you’re a business owner who wants to use video to grow your business, then growing your YouTube channel should not be your goal. Growing your email list is a much more profitable objective.
Once you get to 100 YouTube subscribers, you are allowed to create a custom link for your YouTube channel. Beyond that, your effort is better spent on growing your email list and that should be your call to action.
You can’t have multiple calls to action because it confuses people. Either you want people to join your email list, or you want them to subscribe to your YouTube channel. You have to be consistent with one message or the other in order for your call to action to be effective.
As powerful a marketing tool as YouTube is, there’s no stronger relationship you can have with prospective clients than having weekly access to their inbox.
Long-Term SEO Benefits
Once the blog is set up, each video on YouTube will have a link in its description box to the companion blog post for that recipe where someone can get additional information or details.
This is how YouTube will directly drive traffic to the Rx Catering website over the long term without Cheron having to do any additional work.
Just Get Started
The Rx Catering website isn’t ready for prime time yet. More on that in a forthcoming article.
But we’re still driving traffic to it right now via the cooking show because it was important to get the cooking show started to lay the foundation for everything else.
The Rx Catering blog doesn’t exist yet, but it will.
The Rx Catering website isn’t optimized for processing orders yet, but it will be.
What’s important is that Cheron is making progress towards her objective because she started moving her feet instead of waiting for everything to be perfect.
Perfection is something you can work towards, though it’s never really possible to achieve. But if you require things to be perfect as a condition for you to even get started, you’ll never get anywhere.
