Financial Marketing Compliance Challenges and Opportunities

June 1, 2015 by John McDougall

Content marketing for financial institutions can be challenging with the many requirements that are needed to ensure compliance. In this podcast, we’ll be discussing compliance, content marketing, social media, and more for financial institutions with Northeast Managing Director Pam Buckley, of Fortune 500 company FIS Global.

John McDougall: Hi, I’m John McDougall, and welcome to Authority Marketing Roadmap. Today my guest is Pam Buckley, Northeast Managing Director for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance or EGRC Solutions, with FIS — the world’s largest global provider dedicated to banking and payments technologies.

Today we’re talking about financial marketing compliance, challenges, and opportunities. Welcome, Pam.

Pam Buckley: Thank you, John.

Regulatory Compliance Concerns Regarding Content Development

John: What are the challenges you hear that banks and credit unions are facing, in terms of regulatory compliance when developing content?

Pam: There’s no doubt that increased regulatory burden and greater examiner scrutiny has financial institutions concerned. The corresponding cost of compliance continues to rise. I would say that financial institutions are struggling to keep up with new and amended laws and regulations, such as the integrated mortgage disclosures, which go into effect August 1st.

Never a dull moment when it comes to regulatory compliance. When developing content, we often hear that regulatory compliance is a challenge and that there’s a disconnect between marketing professionals and compliance officers or compliance departments.

It’s critical that financial institutions establish a compliance committee comprised of one representative from each functional area of the bank or credit union, including marketing. The two departments really must work together closely to ensure that all advertisements, disclosures, and marketing collateral comply with applicable federal and state laws and regulations, regardless of the marketing medium.

Establishing an adhering to a comprehensive advertising or marketing compliance review process that encompasses all mediums ‑‑ digital, print, radio, TV, et cetera ‑‑ is critical, and that will keep your institution from running afoul of the regulations and incurring costly fines and reputation risk.

We’ve got to remember that compliance officers and departments have a job to do, and they’re expected to keep the financial institution out of trouble with the regulators, so they therefore need everyone’s support and cooperation toward that end.

I’d also note that we’re seeing UDAP cases enforcement actions on the rise, with dozens of enforcement actions seen to date around all kinds of unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices in marketing, and much more. That secondary review process is more crucial now than ever.

Can Financial Institutions Keep Up With Content Marketing?

John: Do you feel that financial institutions will be able to keep up with the current wave of content marketing, or is the regulatory burden too great in some ways?

Pam: While regulatory burden is at an all‑time high, the good news is that when you’re simply promoting your brand or highlighting your employees or your community involvement, for example, then there are far fewer regulatory compliance requirements.

This is particularly good news as financial institutions are turning more and more to digital or social media to promote their brand, engage with their customers, and establish a following. You’ve just got to remember that when you do promote a specific deposit, credit, insurance, or wealth management products, for example, then you need to comply with all applicable state laws and regulations, regardless of that marketing medium.

This just reinforces the need for that robust advertising compliance review process that includes digital content.

When Will an Institution Need Additional Disclosures For Content?

John: In general, blogging, YouTube, or social media — if you are giving financial tips, and helpful information, what you’re saying is that is a little bit less worrisome than when you’re specifically promoting products?

Pam: Yes. For example, when you are promoting a credit product and you include certain triggering terms, then that necessitates the need for additional disclosures. When you’re simply promoting your brand or you’re providing those helpful tips — that kind of information — then far fewer compliance disclosures are necessary.

Again, if it’s promoting brand, heightening awareness, and highlighting that community involvement — or charitable giving, for example — then you’ve got fewer compliance disclosures or requirements that come into play.

Navigating the Legal Aspect of Contests & Raffles

Pam: I’d add though, that very often we see contests or raffles. These are very tricky. They can be complex. When you are considering those types of marketing campaigns, it’s definitely critical that you first seek input from compliance and legal before you launch those types of campaigns.

They’re more involved. They have many more compliance requirements and also heightened risk for noncompliance with unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices — which everyone wants to steer clear of these days.

John: With that said, it’s doable, you just have to come up with a system to get the checks in place.

Pam: Exactly. Compliance is manageable, it’s just a matter of making sure you’ve got that process in place to perform the secondary review, whether it’s print, digital, or website — you name it. It still requires that ongoing monitoring and audit, so that you can detect, correct, and remediate any of those compliance issues that may come up.

You certainly want to get it right first, before you launch, post, or send something to print.

A Unique Approach to Social Media Marketing for Financial Institutions

John: At the financial brand forum, where we met last week in Vegas — which was an amazing financial marketing conference — the marketing person from Navy Federal Credit Union spoke. He was great. Did you hear him speak?

You were probably manning your booth there?

Pam: No, I did hear Michael Toner speak. I thought he was fantastic. He provided lots of great information about Navy Federal Credit Union’s approach to social media — their strategy, their success. I loved that executive dashboard that he shared, highlighting the nine metrics that are great to follow — number of posts, number of followers, numbers of Tweets, all that good information.

Certainly you want to be tracking the results and the ROI associated with social media. I thought he did an excellent job.

John: He also talked a little bit about contests, since you were just mentioning that, that kind of jogged my memory about what he was talking about. He’s had some good success with that. As a financial institution — and you’re saying that there’s some more risk there — but the people that are doing it, even with that risk and figuring out the compliance — are having huge success and giving case studies at the major conferences.

I find that interesting that some people are just shying away, I think because of compliance, and others that are doing it are winning big, because a fair amount of people are shying away.

Pam: That’s so true, and you’re absolutely right. You’ve got to kind of get in the game. When it comes to contests and raffles, privacy comes into play, making sure that you’ve gotten folks, for example winners, to waive their right to privacy if you’re going to communicate their name or publicize the name of the winner, and many other laws and regulations.

Even state usury laws come into play. That’s all. It is manageable, it’s just they’re a little bit more complex. It’s just a matter of making sure that those campaigns really go through a pretty thorough compliance and legal review process before they’re launched. When it’s done right, it certainly can be extremely successful. We’re seeing it every day.

Moving Into Content Marketing Quickly and Easily

John: How can financial institutions come up with a process to get content moving quickly for blogging, SEO, social media, et cetera?

Pam: Great question. I believe it all starts with a social media strategy. We’ve seen plenty of examples where banks just decided, “OK, I’m going to launch a Facebook page and just put something up there,” but really didn’t follow through with it, and really hadn’t even thought through, “What are my goals and objectives? Who am I trying to reach? Who’s my target audience? What am I trying to achieve through social media?”

First and foremost, it’s bringing all of the key stakeholders to the table to have a discussion around [a] social media strategy. You’ve got to have legal, compliance, risk, marketing, IT, and the various business units within your financial institution — get everybody to the table to have that discussion, think about what those goals and objectives are, and then what would be the best social media platforms for you to begin with, based on the target audience that you’re trying to reach.

That’s going to help you determine — is it Facebook? Maybe it’s Twitter, Instagram, or Yelp. You’ve got to kind of think through that strategy and develop a social media policy, procedures. You’ve got to make clear who within the institution has the authority to post on the bank or the credit union’s behalf. That’s very important.

Social Media Risk Assessment – What Is It and Why Is It Critical?

Pam: Then performing that social media risk assessment. For example, the FFIEC guidance that was published in December 2013 — that final guidance made clear that financial institutions are expected to perform a social media risk assessment. Very important that that be done and that you’re monitoring social media activity on an ongoing basis.

That’s really critical, especially where it’s real‑time. You’ve got to immediately respond and demonstrate empathy, and certainly there could be negative information posted — but it’s really an opportunity to turn that around, as long as you are responding appropriately and timely, and ideally kind of taking it offline.

Inevitably, financial institutions have been successful in turning those types of criticisms around and highlighting some really great customer service.

What You Need to Know About FFIEC Guidance

John: Those are great tips. If you could walk our listeners through a little bit about what you said in terms of FFIEC guidance. Can you talk about that institution a little bit, and the progression, in 2012 [and] 2013, what’s been happening there.

Pam: The FFIEC is the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, and it is basically all of the regulatory agencies — the federal regulatory agencies. You’ve got the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the National Credit Union Association.

They all got together and published final guidance around social media in December 2013. The good news is, there were no new requirements contained within that guidance. That’s really great news in these years of massive increased regulations.

We had Dodd‑Frank Act — we’ve got these new integrated mortgage disclosures going into effect in just a few months. Again, great news, there were no new requirements in that guidance, however, it did emphasize the focus on an institution’s compliance management system, or CMS. That all generally begins with a risk assessment, policies and procedures, internal controls, monitoring, audit, and training.

The regulators are expecting financial institutions who are active on social media to have performed that social media risk assessment — to have established policies that speak to the activity that they’re involved in and to have established pretty comprehensive monitoring and audit programs to be sure that you are continually reviewing digital content for compliance purposes, just like you would your website, your print ads, or your radio ads, for example.

At this point, here we are year and a half later since that guidance was issued and still seeing that there are institutions who haven’t performed that risk assessment, or maybe haven’t updated audit program and policies to reflect current activity.

Very important that you take a look at that guidance, make sure that you are complying with it, and that you’ve developed a solid social media strategy before you head in feet first.

Keeping Digital Marketing Compliance Costs Down

John: How can financial institutions keep the costs down, in terms of digital marketing compliance, with all these different things they have to work on?

Pam: To contain the costs associated with the digital marketing compliance, first and foremost, leverage all your available resources. That includes your compliance officer, compliance department, and focus on that brand awareness to start.

When you’re highlighting your employees, your community involvement, your brand, your charitable giving, for example, that’s the great stuff to start with and that’s what’s people want to hear about. Fewer compliance disclosures or requirements [are] associated with those types of posts and that type of content.

That’s the best place to start. Certainly be thoughtful about the platforms that you launch first, but just making sure that you’re providing for that secondary review before you’re launching and having the discussion. It’s the type of thing where there’s going to be — maybe you established a task force, or a round table, and you’re reviewing this periodically just to make sure that things are going as expected — and jumping on any issues that arise, whether it’s consumer complaints, or negative posts, that type of thing.

It’s all about the monitoring with the digital content, [it’s] critical to be staying on top of that. If you don’t have the resources internally, then there may be a need to partner with a reputable firm to make sure that you are providing for that ongoing monitoring, and you can demonstrate that to the regulators.

How Can Financial Institutions Benefit From Working With Marketing Agencies That Are Trained in Compliance?

John: What about agencies like ours, where my sister agency, “McDougall and Duval Advertising,” has been trained by you. How will that benefit McDougall Interactive — which is something we’re interested in doing — and how do financial institutions benefit from an agency that is already compliance trained?

Pam: We were thrilled to partner with McDougall and Duval last year and to educate their staff on regulatory compliance requirements — and believe they’re the first ad agency in the country to be trained by FIS on regulatory compliance. That’s really a great sales point for them, as they’re partnering with financial institutions, that they are trained on compliance, so they get it.

They understand what the requirements are, as well as the limitations. Just to sort of have that level playing field, that’s huge. Financial institutions — which is a very highly regulated industry — if I were running a bank and I had a choice between an ad agency that had been trained on compliance and one that hadn’t, I’d be inclined to speak further with the one that had.

They’re likeminded. They understand what the ramifications are for noncompliance. Let’s face it, with the rise in enforcement actions that we’re seeing for noncompliance, we all want to stay out of trouble, we want to stay out of the news, avoid that reputation risk, as well as that costly legal compliance financial risk to the institution.

What Is the Compliance Process?

John: Let’s say we get certified or trained by you for compliance, and then we go through the blog posts that we’ve written for some of our clients and send them back to the client. They’re not ready to go, as is, without their compliance team also looking at them?

Pam: Generally speaking, usually it’s going to go through compliance first, and then maybe a final review by us, or whomever. You certainly want the compliance department at your own institution to be on board and to have provided input. Generally, that’s how it works.

In some cases they’d run their ads through their compliance department first and then send to us. In other cases, we review the content and then just kind of copy whoever their compliance manager or liaison may be on the response. There’s also plenty of automated solutions for ad and disclosure review, for example, for compliance purposes.

John: I’m just trying to walk through a little bit of the possible scenarios where we can help financial institutions more with your potential services.

Basically what you just said is if McDougall Interactive is trained by you, there’s still a process, even if we write blog posts or social media updates for our financial services customers — that doesn’t mean because we’ve been trained that it’s ready to go, 100 percent, without further review from the banks compliance department?

Pam: Once we go through the training, then you certainly have a good sense of the types of content that is OK to go out without additional disclosures. You’d have that — that would sort of be top of mind, the type of content that’s going to require additional disclosures.

For example, if you’re promoting credit products, then automatically you’ve got to include the Equal Housing Lender logo and legend. Typically if you’re including certain terms or conditions, then that may trigger the need for additional disclosures, such as the term of repayment, cost of repayment, things like that.

This is what we do for many of our clients — we review their advertisements for compliance purposes. We’ve got a hotline — a team of compliance experts that does just that on a day to day basis. We’ve got a terrific client portal that our clients can actually submit and lots of great resources.

They can review their ads. They can go through the advertisement, the blog, the content, for all of these requirements to make sure that it’s compliant before they go live with it. There’s different ways that we can structure it, but those are just a couple of examples.

Learn More about FIS Global and Authority Marketing Today

John: You do a lot of outsourcing, essentially. You handle the compliance for many companies. How big is your firm?

Pam: FIS Global is a Fortune 500 company. We’ve got 40,000 employees worldwide. EGRC Solutions is the division of FIS that focuses on risk information security and compliance. Our ad and disclosure review service, for example, is one of many services and solutions that we offer.

This is the one where we’d partner with financial institutions to provide that compliance review for them. They can co‑source that with us.

John: I’d like to hear more about that. What’s your website, and are there certain pages on the site that would be helpful for our listeners?

Pam: FISGlobal.com/EGRC will direct you to our Enterprise Governance Risk and Compliance Solutions Web page. Certainly folks can email moreinfo@fisglobal.com, or dial our 800 number.

John: The number I have is 800‑822‑6758.

Pam: Correct.

John: That was moreinfo@fisglobal.com. Again, this has been John McDougall with workingdemosite.com/authority and Pam Buckley. Come back to workingdemosite.com/authority for more interviews, and information on authority marketing.

See you next time on the Authority Marketing Roadmap. Thanks, Pam.

Pam: Thank you, John.

John: Great talking to you.

Pam: Appreciate it.

John: See you.

Pam: Thank you. Bye.

5 Successful Sales Tips with Daniel Pink

May 26, 2015 by John McDougall

Copyblogger Authority Rainmaker 2015 conference review series #1

Sales has changed radically. More radically in the last 10 years than in the last hundred years according to Daniel Pink, author of the #1 bestseller To Sell is Human.

Marketers no longer have the advantage of a captive audience like they did when there were a limited number of media outlets and we have shifted from a world of buyer beware to a world of seller beware. Daniel Pink calls this information asymmetry.

This means you have to sell less and engage more via helpful content.

Dan Pink’s talk was organized into the following structure:

A. One insight
B. Three principles
C. Five takeaways

One insight: What do I do about this?

He mused that top MBA programs don’t teach sales, although they do teach how to manage sales people lol.

Three sales principles

Attunement – it’s important to find common ground with prospects If you are just giving a monologue and not listening, asking questions and attuned to your prospects, you’ll never find common ground or create a deep connection.
Buoyancy – it’s important to stay afloat in an ocean of rejection Dan said that you can increase your sales experience and buffer rejection by using a positive affirmation such as “you can do this”. Even better is to ask yourself “can you do this?” Top athletes do this before they perform and it makes them mentally prepared for competition by creating powerful internal dialogue that pushes them to affirm what they are capable of.
Clarity – help customers learn what questions to ask In this day and age, customers have an incredible amount of answers right at their fingertips. What they often don’t have is someone to help them curate the information and decide what questions to ask.

Five takeaways – sales tips

People think that extroverts are better sales people but in reality ambiverts are the best. Glad-handing used car salesman types don’t make the most sales but neither do introverts who can’t leave the house. The good news for many of us is that research shows people who are somewhere in the middle connect with customers best.

Asking questions is one of the most powerful sales tools and it helps customers internalize their debate about working with you. Ronald Reagan asked the country “are you better off than you were four years ago?” He did not say to Jimmy Carter, “Your economic policy deteriorated over the last 48 months.” This made people draw their own conclusions deeply. This principle works great when the facts are clearly on your side but does not work great when they are not.
A principle outlined by Dr. Robert Cialdini says that a small negative added to a list of benefits of your product or services can significantly increase trust. So next time you add a big bullet list of everything that is so wonderful about you and your company on your website, strongly consider adding a very small negative that makes you more human and believable.
Rhymes enhance processing influency. Studies show that rhymes, lists, alliteration and repetition help in marketing. E.g. “Woes unite foes” versus “Woes unite enemies”, works better. Children learn from nursery rhymes and this is ingrained in our DNA. We can make use of this in sales and marketing.
Give people an offramp and make it easy. Sometimes it’s not about changing people’s minds but just making it very easy for them to act.

Daniel closed by saying essentially that it is important to serve first and sell second. That helps to make selling human.

When surveyed, Daniel showed how people have very bad things to say about salespeople. In reality, we are all selling something just about every day but the key is helping people by selling what they already want and not pitching to those that have no interest.

Financial Brand Forum: marketing conference review 2015

May 14, 2015 by John McDougall

Digital authority is usually won in the niches, such as various segments of finance and yet banks and credit unions are not well known for leading the charge online. There are some very clear reasons as to why.

I came to this Financial marketing conference looking for something very specific. At McDougall Interactive, we’ve had national level success with bank and credit union marketing over the years, but at times I get very frustrated with the compliance issues.

Some of our local clients are painfully slow to accept and embrace the full process of content marketing. Some have even started with high expectations and then stopped because the compliance officer or the IT department slows things down to a crawl that makes a snail on Valium seem faster than a speeding bullet.

Others have even had award winning and national success and then backed off of full-fledged content marketing, and even conversion optimization, due to a regulatory burden or various other fears.

Is it the fate of financial services marketing to forever be slow and behind the rest of the marketing community? That’s what I wanted to explore more deeply, and what follows is my conclusion.

The overall tone of some of the top-level speakers

Brett King, author of banking 2.0, who is apparently known for shaking things up, said that there are far too many bankers and far too few technologists, behavioral psychologists, information designers and data experts.

Brett also quoted Bill Gates who said “if your culture doesn’t like geeks you are in real trouble.”

He said that over the last 250 years there has not been one industry that was immune to disruption, and the bankers and financial institutions that put their head in the sand and refuse to fully get on board with digital transformation will not make it, and some will even go out of business.

Another speaker cited that by 2020, 40% of the US population will be “digital natives” and will account for 39% of the nations income. This means that anyone who doesn’t fully embrace digital marketing will be missing out on nearly half of their potential audience.

Brett also mentioned that there are 18,000 financial technology companies receiving more than $20 billion in funding. That’s a lot more money pouring into them than to branches and traditional banking.

I asked Mark Ryan, the co-founder and chief analytics officer of Extractable, at the end of his talk (which was my favorite of the conference) if he felt that content marketing was working consistently for banks and picking up steam, or if the regulatory burden was diminishing their future of partaking in the space.

He said there is really good news for those that do embrace creating great content and getting people to engage with it, because many banks are struggling to grasp how it is a game changer for their bottom line. He shared results based on having analyzed client data from 10 million users over 10 years. It showed how content marketing used for search engine optimization, social media and increasing conversions has the overall largest effect on increasing the return on marketing investment for financial services companies.

So is content marketing too difficult for banks?

The answer is definitely yes for those that let it be too difficult. The answer is no for a small amount of pioneers that are going to eat the lunch of the bankers that fail to get on board quick enough.

Which digital marketing tactics are hot?

One of the first talks to go into great detail on tactics was by Matt Wilcox of Fiserve.

Here are his seven most effective digital marketing strategies in banking.

Leveraging smart data and analytics
Email marketing
Social media
Mobile marketing
Retargeting
Search engine marketing including SEO and paid search
A/B testing and conversion optimization

A continual theme of the conference is that some financial institutions are doing a poor job of truly leveraging analytics and website data to improve their website experiences. Those that are doing a great job with it are having the biggest wins. Those that do things like put the Google Analytics code in their website and then don’t do anything with it are losing.

Where do we go from here?

Mark Ryan, the cofounder and chief analytics officer of Extractable, showed a funny picture of young kids coloring on large white paper on the floor. He said that is the perception of the web team by many of the c-suites. This perception has to change because website marketing teams are more like people at the command center of NASA. We are a combination of engineers and artists, and we leverage big data to generate tens of millions of dollars of revenue. That kind of activity cannot be solely left to IT departments and rogue graphic designers.

He reminded us of how financial institutions have historically been some of the top spenders in paid search and online content creation, and how some of the top tasks that people do online are finance related. The Internet continues to grow, and with it the opportunities for marketing, but the gap between the people doing it right and the people dipping their toe in the water has never been wider.

Mark Ryan simply blew my mind with his talk. I have been doing digital marketing for over 20 years now and can recognize greatness when I see it. The level of detail that he shared about projecting the lift on revenue from the various stages of Internet marketing, makes it clear why he has been chosen by companies like Chase and PayPal to do their marketing.

These are the kind of talks that inspire me to come to conferences. Clearly some people are doing financial services marketing properly, using search engine optimization, competitive analysis, paid search with landing pages / conversion optimization, leveraging analytics to inform website redesigns, getting conversions from social media and using email marketing to nurture prospects into becoming multi-product customers.

I suppose the best news of the conference is that there are a lot of people I will come across that won’t hire me and that won’t do deep content and digital marketing. That means that the financial institutions I work with that embrace it fully are even more likely to be amazing case studies.

How to Make YouTube Videos and Position Yourself as an Authority

April 29, 2015 by John McDougall

John McDougall: Hi, I’m John McDougall with workingdemosite.com/authority, and I’m here today with Jimmy Craig and Justin Parker of Methodloft and FatAwesome. Welcome, guys.

Justin Parker: Hi.

Jimmy Craig: Good to be here. Thanks for having us.

John: How did you guys get started with viral videos?

Jimmy: It started back when we both were still in college. I feel like it was right around the time when viral videos were just becoming a thing. It wasn’t a household term at that point. Sites like eBaumsWorld and CollegeHumor were just starting to blow up. We made this video called “Turtle Boy.”

We were still in college, and it was within a week, the video had blown up on all the major comedy sites. Before we knew it, we were getting phone calls. It was on MTV, VH1, BBC. People actually flew out from Tokyo to interview this kid.

John: To interview turtle boy?

Justin: Yeah.

Jimmy: Yes.

John: He was what? One of your friends? Local guy?

Justin: He was a kid from my school, and he was the right look.

John: You got started. Did you intend to become popular on YouTube, or did you just fall into it?

Jimmy: We started making videos just for ourselves, but then when we saw viral videos were a thing, we were like, “maybe we have a knack for it.” Then we continued to do it. When we had several videos do well online, it solidified what we thought. At that time, it was like, “We’re not going to make a career out of this.” It was still just cool for us.

Eventually, things snowballed to the point where more doors were opened to work with brands, and television networks and stuff like that.

John: How do you stand out as a couple of white guys in their 20s?

[laughter]

Justin: You know, we start with what makes us laugh. We try to have a unique idea about something that is common. That’s the optimal situation. A lot of times we can have an idea that’s this really weird, out there idea, and maybe a lot of people aren’t going to laugh.

John: A certain group will, but that group’s too small to go broad.

Justin: The videos, they take a while to make. You’re trying to balance out how much effort do we want to put into something that not a lot of people are going to watch? It’s definitely this balance that we try to find between selling out a little bit, and try to expand the audience but still being ourselves, and 100 percent doing something that we want to do. We do either. It depends on how we’re feeling that day.

John: Try a little bit of both. Nice. How do people get more subscribers on YouTube? How did you start to get people back to your site from YouTube, things like that?

Justin: As Jimmy was saying, we had a few videos go viral at the beginning, and we were getting featured on a lot of sites. Some things were getting on TV. Nobody was connecting the dots that we were making it, because we didn’t brand ourselves well or at all. We just had the title, “Fatawesome” at the end.

It was frustrating, because we were like, every video that we make has to go viral on its own, without any work we had done previously. Every video has to be the best video ever or no one’s going to see it, and it was very frustrating. We decided to brand ourselves. We made this red, dancing monster.

We started putting that at the end of videos, and people loved it. Now we had a thing. That’s a huge, huge part of YouTube is having a thing. Every day there’s another viral video, 10 viral videos a day, whatever it is. You just move on to the next one. People oftentimes don’t dig any further.

If you start to have this thing that ties it all together, they’re like, “Oh, I remember this monster. I love this monster.”

John: To come back to regularly, you mean? You had hits early on, but in order to get consistency, is that what you’re saying?

Justin: Yeah. Maybe somebody saw one video and they loved it, and they didn’t dig any further.

Then, if we had another video go viral, they’re like, “This red monster, I remember this. Now this is two videos that I’ve seen with this. All right, let me take a look at these guys. Maybe they’re putting out stuff on a consistent basis that I would like.” Now it’s more than this one‑off thing.

We found that that really changed things for us.

John: You had to work on your branding?

Justin: For sure.

John: What else? Did you redesign your website or try to get more people coming from YouTube to click over to your site?

Jimmy: For getting subscribers, it was just like Justin said, helping people connect the dots. This is the same duo that’s producing all this different content, and creating one destination for them, and funneling people toward our YouTube channel.

John: Can that work for any company, getting viral videos, or is that more for brands that have an ability to be funnier?

Jimmy: I think any recognition helps establish yourself as an authority. A viral video, whether it’s serious or funny, brings attention to you. Ideally, positive attention to you. Any of those things will help establish you as an authority.

Justin: Everybody thinks of a viral video as being “I want to do this crazy, zany idea”. That’s not the case, necessarily. Or people are like, “How can I make a viral video for my company? I don’t fit the mold. I’m not Doritos.”

John: Law firms, for example. A medical malpractice law firm may not be the best choice necessarily, for a viral video.

Justin: Right, unless they wanted to do something that was very educational that was in their general world, like the history of…You know what I mean? It’s doesn’t have to be — it’s just something sharable and educational.

John: You can’t think about it as always — viral is not necessarily funny.

Justin: Correct.

Jimmy: It’s just sharable, that’s it.

John: For example, McDougall Interactive, how could I make my YouTube channel more sharable?

Jimmy: Well, consistently put out content.

Justin: Yeah, consistency’s big. Brand everything. And think, again, what is sharable? You’re on the Internet. You work in the Internet.

John: You have to broaden it out, you’re saying? Don’t think just — we’ve had this conversation before, and I would say, “Let’s do the history of SEO.” You might say something more broad than that.

Jimmy: At the same time, it’s still important to have a thing. The SEO guy that’s such‑and‑such.

John: Right, like Rand Fishkin, from Moz. He wears yellow sneakers at conferences. He has a funny handlebar mustache, he has Whiteboard Fridays. I think what you’re saying is create a thing, a little schtick, and you have to do that to brand yourself on YouTube.

Justin: Right, and you can go viral even in your specific practice area. For you, maybe a video gets 30,000 views, everybody involved in SEO watched it. It depends. It doesn’t have to be eight million people.

John: If the density of your small community, the amount of people in that community, 30,000 would be a lot.

Justin: Correct.

Jimmy: Also, it’s like targeted marketing. Depending on what your goal is, if it’s to reach potential clients, if you’re an attorney that has a specific kind of case, you’re not going to try to reach every person in the US. No, you’re targeting a specific person.

John: Yeah, so viral success within niches. How can YouTube popularity lead to media appearances?

Justin: We have some examples of that. We’ve been featured on “The Today Show” for one of the videos that we did. It was “Cat Friend vs. Dog Friend”. We happened to make a video. It started to go viral. We thought it would be a good fit for “The Today Show.” It’s family friendly.

We searched online, found a contact, gave them a call, said we had a great piece of content here for you. With the 24/7 news cycle, most shows, websites, they want content. They’ve got to keep the content flowing.

If you approach them with a good piece of content that fits whatever their audience is, most people are going to embrace it. To do a little bit of that legwork can help not only make your own thing go viral, but also get you on a television show, as well. We’ve had that happen a few times.

John: What was relevant about “Cat Friend/Dog Friend” at that particular time? Were they doing something on that topic?

Jimmy: It just happened to be that Meredith Vieira was being interviewed about some book, and it was pet related. It fit perfectly. It didn’t fit perfectly, necessarily, with the content, but it fit enough.

John: You just called them?

Jimmy: Yeah. Another thing, too, we did around Christmas is we made a parody about Rudolf. It was related to the media’s obsession with calling people out like witch hunts. And Fox News, the “Fox Five at Five” panel discussed the video. Like Justin said, media outlets need content.

If you can produce something that, ideally, is quality, but something that people can discuss and it’s timely and it’s relevant, obviously these things all increase your chances.

John: And if you have no media experience at all, probably better that they see you on YouTube, “Hey, they might make a good guest,” right?

Jimmy: Yeah, for sure.

Justin: They’re going to learn if you’re personable. They get a better reflection on your character and how you present yourself than just in a blog post. You might be a great writer, but you might not be the best guest. So it’s like a proving ground, you could say, to have YouTube videos.

John: What about your competitors, again? In the sketch group comedy world, who are some of the people that you look up to? Or not necessarily look up to, but who are some of the people out there that you have to keep an eye on, because they are making some ground?

Justin: We’ve crushed all of our competition. I’m not sure there’s anything left to reference.

Jimmy: I’d say the only people, one sketch group that we both were big fans of, actually, are on SNL now, “Good Neighbor.” It’s been fun to watch them make the transition to television, and we’d watch their stuff.

John: That’s pretty rare, right?

Jimmy: Yeah. I’d definitely say it’s very rare. But again, it was a good sign to us, because we feel like we have similar sensibilities, similar sense of humor. They have successfully made the transition into television. They weren’t very “YouTube-y”.

John: How is YouTube really different from comedy on TV?

Justin: YouTube is this massive ocean. There are so many different forms of comedy of everything. What we find that’s the most popular on YouTube, as far as comedy goes, it seems like it’s more towards a younger audience.

John: There is a lot of silly stuff. Cat videos and all.

Jimmy: Yeah. Very zany. Everyone’s like, oh, short attention spans, but that really is the case. You’re going into a YouTube video with, I think, a completely different mindset as opposed to watching a movie or a television show. You’re sitting there invested. You want to see something, a story, some unique perspective.

A lot of videos that go on YouTube are just “10 things that I hate that happened at the movies”, and then it’s just clips of “don’t you hate when people chew, don’t you hate when people keep putting their jacket on”. They’re just saying things that happen. Those things are the kind of things that go crazy viral.

John: What it says is that you need to know the medium that you’re going after. If you want to be on comedy on YouTube, you would need to do that. If you want to be on history on YouTube, there would be a way to get popular and look at what’s going on there.

The same if you want to get on MTV and you want to have a show on there. They have a certain style that needs to fit in there. So you need to know the medium.

Jimmy: It sounds cheesy and generic to say it, but stay true to yourself. “Be authentic” is going to be, you’ll find, the easiest avenue to be successful. For our comedy, we’ve always considered dumbing it down or changing it, adjusting it to reach a wider audience.

Sometimes we have adjusted things, but we still need to be doing what we’re good at, and not trying to cash in on something else. That helps.

Justin: It’s definitely that balance. It’s an interesting situation. Let’s say you want to be a painter. You’re like, “I want to make a living from being a painter. I don’t want to just be a painter, I want to make a living.” And you start painting things that just you like. And you’re like, “I love this,” but everybody’s like, “I don’t love it.”

Now you can’t make a living. You’ve got to find people who love it, too. It’s definitely that balance. Jimmy and I have conversations about this all the time. I think there’s definitely a line where if you’re going to be in entertainment, the only way that you become successful and can make a living in, like, what we’re doing, is other people have to like it. If there’s no audience, you can’t make a living. Sometimes you have to adjust a little bit how you’re going to go about — if we want to make a video that maybe we’re like, “This is too random. Nobody’s going to get this,” right? Or we could do the same kind of sensibilities but base it on something everybody can relate to. We can still bring our flavor to it, make the kind of jokes we want to make.

But instead of making it about “wouldn’t it be crazy if dolphins could talk” or something, we make it about “let’s make a video that pokes fun at the concept of engagement rings”. We did that, and it went viral. It’s definitely a balancing act.

For anybody that’s involved in anything creative, you’re always walking that line between “I want to be me, but I also want to make a living, too”. I think a lot of people can relate to it.

John: What I find interesting is a lot of people would just assume that a lot of the things that go popular on YouTube are very spontaneous. It sounds like, in order to make those things happen, you have to be true to yourself, whether it’s comedy stuff or a law firm, even.

Then you do have to produce it a bit. You have to think about how it’s going to reach the audience.

Justin: Yeah, for sure. It’s not even necessarily about being true to yourself. There’s probably people out there who make things like, “I don’t even like this, but it sells, so I keep doing it.” It’s picking a thing and reproducing it.

So if people like your sensibilities, your kind of comedy, and they go and watch your other videos and it’s not that at all, they’re like “oh, I don’t like this.” So, it’s trying to have your thing. Then you can build your audience, regardless if that’s comedy or if you’re a health guru. Whatever it is, having your thing and sticking to it.

John: You have to have a repeatable, almost a show, if you will.

Jimmy: That’s why I feel like the biggest channels on YouTube are people, individuals, not necessarily “this is a channel about dogs”. It’s “this kid makes videos”. It’s people just connect to a person. They connect to a personality. When they go to the channel, even if they’re making one about videos, and the next one’s about clothes or something like that, they know what to expect from that person. Because that’s them, whether or not they have a gimmick.

I think that applies to any business, too, especially if someone wants to establish themselves as an authority. It’s like creating that personal connection.

John: Absolutely. Those are some great tips, guys, and I appreciate you being here today. Good to see you.

Justin: Thanks for having us.

Jimmy: Thank you.

John: Good. Thanks, everyone, for joining us again on workingdemosite.com/authority. You’ve been listening to John McDougall and Jimmy Craig and Justin Parker from Methodloft and FatAwesome.

Authority Marketing Infographic

April 16, 2015 by John McDougall

The infographic we created below was part of a blog post that I co-authored for the Huffington Post. It helps illustrate how authority marketing is a systematic process that helps you build credibility and thought leadership.

Internet marketing keeps getting more and more complex with so many people developing content and it is harder and harder to stand out. If you are an expert but not yet an authority, there is light at the end of the tunnel when you realize how much greater visibility you can have, if you follow the steps in the authority marketing roadmap.

You need a content marketing plan, we can help