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3 ways to get the RIGHT audience
How Jess Dante captured high-intent users and reached the ultimate Creator goal - replacing herself. Featuring Manychat, ConvertKit, and NordPass.
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She’s replacing herself
We're actually pulling me out of the content because I've been the face of it for the last eight years. We’re introducing other on-camera talent in our short-form videos, and soon we’re introducing them into our YouTube content.
The reason for this is that it gives me more time to work on building the business.
There’s a saying that entrepreneurs should aspire to “work ON the business, not IN the business.”
To do that, a business needs to be profitable enough to pay people to do the work the founder was previously doing.
Jess Dante has achieved a Creator’s ultimate version of this goal, by replacing herself in the video content that drives sales for her digital tour guide business, Love and London!
What strategies and tactics did she use to get to this point?
Let’s get into it!
The Business
.Highlights.
.Breakdown.
.Observations.
Jess’ success isn’t driven by huge audience numbers - in fact, her largest audience is <500k.
Instead, she’s built a funnel with three (3) entrance points that help her get the right viewers to convert into paying customers.
Google Search
Nine years ago, there wasn't really anyone creating content focused on giving actionable tips for people coming to visit [London]. Even our tourism board wasn't really doing anything on YouTube at the time.
As a result, our first few videos about London all performed really well in Google search, because those videos were fulfilling something that people were Googling.
Even now, a lot of our YouTube videos - especially a lot of the older ones - still get quite a bit of traffic from Google search specifically.
Search traffic converts really well because it’s high-intent. Think about it: you wouldn’t be searching “best pubs in London” if you didn't have intent to find and visit pubs in London. By being one of the only sources of information for these sorts of high-intent searches, Jess was able to build and maintain a funnel of high-intent traffic.
It’s not just her YouTube that drives search, by the way. She implemented a simple SEO strategy to get leads to her website as well.
We get a lot of traffic from Search on our website too, because we have articles like “10 boutique hotels to book in London” or “Top 10 foodie tours to do in London”.
YouTube Algorithm
Our #1 traffic source is still Browse…when people get onto our videos, if they watch 1-2 of them, it seems like they get served a lot of them, and we have so many people that are like “We binge watched all your videos before we came!”
If you’re planning a trip to London, you’re probably spending a lot of money and want to maximize the value of your trip. As a result, you’re not just going to watch 1-2 videos - you’re going to go deep, especially if you enjoy the content / Creator.
The YouTube algorithm knows this and shows similar content from the same Creator in Browse and Suggested videos to keep you watching. Once again, this is an opportunity to acquire high-intent viewers.
Short-form
Short-form is basically just video discovery… It's harder to convert those people, but we are always trying to get them onto the email list. For the majority of our short-form videos, the call to action at the end is to sign up to one of our lead magnets.
Jess gets 2-4 million views per month across her short-form posts, but they’re low-intent. As a result, she takes a “wide net” approach to capture as many leads as possible (i.e. anyone who might eventually visit London), and then convert them to sale later (once they book a trip).
Once a viewer is hooked, the next step in the funnel is to sign them up for the newsletter, which drives 50% of her business.
I needed to be able to turn someone who's a one time passive viewer into a potential customer. I figured if I could email them: “Look, we have another video,” then I could maybe try to shift them into someone who's watching more and more.
(I’ve always wondered why more Creators don’t sign up video viewers to email, simply as a way to let them know when the next piece of content is out…)
To maximize conversions to the newsletter, Jess offers what’s called a “lead magnet” - a free piece of digital content that’s exclusive, high-value, and requires an email signup to access. In this case, it’s her London 101 guide.
Once she’s acquired a viewer’s email, she can sell them on the digital travel guides that drive 55% of her business’ revenue.
This funnel is, of course, a bit of a simplification:
It's a whole ecosystem, with many different touch points and journeys that they can go through.
Poll
What drives your top-of-funnel? |
The Stack
Website - Wordpress + Squarespace
Hosting - GoDaddy
GoDaddy is sometimes the bane of my existence…It sometimes goes down, and they sometimes can help, they sometimes can't.
Email - ConvertKit
I'm pretty sure the reason I went with ConvertKit is because I saw a free YouTube series from Pat Flynn about how to set up and start building your email list.
Storefront - Shopify, switched from SendOwl
SendOwl is fine if you're selling one thing, but the cart function isn't very good when you have more.
Engagement - Manychat
At the end of our Instagram videos, we say, “If you want our free London 101 guide, just comment “Free guide” and we'll send you a DM. Then we get their information through the DMs, and that connects to our email list. That's actually grown our email list quite a lot.
Our short-form videos were reaching millions of people every month, but we weren’t converting people into our email list and getting them to buy…so being able to bridge that gap on Instagram has helped us fix the problem of moving these passive viewers down the funnel.
Password Management - NordPass
We use NordPass, where we can share login details only with specific people on our team, and then we can pull them out as quickly as possible. We can make changes, and it also just keeps everything in one place.
Link in Bio - Linktree
Affiliates - Direct to brand / whatever a brand uses - E.g. Expedia (Partnerize), Booking.com, Get Your Guide, Viator, Walks (Tapfiliate), Impact, Commission Junction
I prefer direct-to-brand over any of the aggregators because I like to see the data and going direct, you can see really good data. I love to pull that and see what's working, what's not. I can see which articles are driving the most sales, things like that.
Communication - Slack
Storage - Dropbox
My producer gets everything uploaded into Dropbox and then we go in and tag things so my editors who need B-roll can easily search for a shot of, say, London Bridge and then they can find that tag and find that footage.
Documents - Google Drive + Notion
Project Management - Asana
Everybody has to get on board with Asana, no matter what they're doing with us - it is a must and they have to learn it quickly because we do everything there.
Finances - Xero (accounting) + Accountant + Manzo (business banking) + Google Sheets
Representation - Rebecca from September Talent
I wanted somebody that could help with negotiating bigger contracts for us. I also just really needed somebody to help with time, because I just didn't have the time to hop on calls with every brand that came in and to find out what they were looking for.
Team - Short-form producer + YouTube team (Producer + Shooters + Editors + On-camera talent) + Blog writers
Everyone's been contracted up until actually today. My first full time employee is about to sign her contract!
Video Distribution - Direct to platform
Video Production - Doesn’t know + Frame for feedback
I love that I don't know this, because it means I have actually properly pulled out of it, which was the intention.
Relevant Previous Interviews
Subscribe on YouTube for the full interview
Jerry Won - Create a salary through recurring revenue (Creator Logic)
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Written by Avi Gandhi, edited by Melody Song,
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