Jaimie Abbott: Well, my guest today is Deb Szabo. And Deb empowers businesses to achieve tangible growth by helping you build credibility, nurture a local community, and accelerate the buyer's journey. Business owners work with Deb because of her ability to uncover their unique selling point, articulate their messaging, provide strategy to optimise their content marketing, and create a clear pathway to bring ideas to life, stand out from the crowd, and make more money. We all want to do that. She is an advocate of using video to create authentic connections and elevate your brand. Now, her mission is to help people get unstuck with tech. Don’t we all need help with that? Tell their unique story and amplify their message so they become the catalyst for change in someone else's world. Now, throughout her three decades working in marketing and media, she has embraced the evolution of the digital world and its powerful ability to let us talk to audiences anywhere in the world, anytime, for free. Deb is a self-confessed tech geek who teaches you how to leverage video and AI inside her Content Catalyst membership. She gives you the strategy and tools so you know what content to make, how to create it, and where to share it so you can go from forgettable to credible. Deb Szabo, welcome to Pitch Perfect.
Deb Szabo: That's a heck of an intro. I think I'm going to have to summarise that again.
Jaimie Abbott: I would say it's, well, we're in PR Club and Deb's one of my PR Club members as well, which is not in the bio. I often, we always talk about the power of a one sheet and, I get everyone to do a one sheet and that's what we use to send to podcast hosts to pitch ourselves. And not only does yours look the best I've ever seen, it's got this gorgeous little TV, sort of screen with her photo inside, but there actually is not one spelling mistake and that's quite rare, actually. I get so many different people not in PR Club, of course, but PR. I got podcast guests send me their one sheet and I have to kind of ad lib a bit around the grammatical errors, but yours is flawless. So congratulations on that.
Deb Szabo: Goodness, Jaimie, the pressure's on because there's always a typo somewhere.
Jaimie Abbott: I'm the biggest. I always tell people all the time online going, you know, I even messaged someone on LinkedIn yesterday and said, "Do you know you spelled the word privilege wrong?" Some stranger on the LinkedIn connections. I mean, not a stranger, they’re a connection, but it really gripes me. So I notice it when it's done right because it's, that's definitely not the norm. Welcome to Pitch Perfect. So many questions to ask you. I guess the first thing I want to ask you is how did you. You've done a lot of things. You know, you’re on My Kitchen Rules as well, which I tell everyone. You’re one of the...
Deb Szabo: Thanks, Jaimie, for pinging that up.
Jaimie Abbott: It should be in your bio. I know you've got it as seen on, but how did you kind of a) realise it was video marketing that you were most passionate about and then b) get into it?
Deb Szabo: Yeah, so I've worked in marketing, I feel, forever, like you said, three decades of sales and marketing experience. You know, old sounds like there, but so I've always been in marketing and I've always been like the strategist as a mindset. I'm a big picture thinker and, but I've always had that creative side of me that loves capturing the moment. And through businesses that I've worked with, I was always the person with the video camera capturing what was happening behind the scenes. And then when, and I've used video for years in business as well, and I've seen the impact and I guess over, you know, 2020, I, the business I was working with, we had to double down with connection with our audience because people couldn't come to us. And so I went hard using video live stream events, like epic live stream events. And I just loved every minute. I would spend every waking hour on YouTube looking up how to do everything. And then I got a mentor and a video coach who was, you know, a cinematographer. He used to do documentaries and things like that. So I learned from him and then I joined up with another filmmaking course and just learned everything. And because I'm marketing, I could see how marketing and video were just hand in hand. For me, they were just, it was the best way, apart from standing in front of somebody, to let people know what we do, but also create connection and community.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah, that's great. And is it really important? Because I know a lot of people, including inside PR Club, that you really have to push to get them to show up on camera. I mean, is it really important for video marketing to be part of your PR and your marketing strategy?
Deb Szabo: For me it is. I think personal brand is one of the biggest things. And I know we've had this discussion many times about the quickest way to build a business is having a good, strong personal brand. If you are in a corporate job, and you've got a good, strong personal brand as well, if you leave that job and you go somewhere else, it makes it so much easier for your audience to follow along. And I saw that for years when I, wherever I worked, I, you know, had clients that would follow me everywhere because it was all about your personal branding. So talking on camera is one of the best ways to build that personal brand and to accelerate your business growth as well.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And how easy is it? I mean, I find it easy because I've been working in front of the camera since I was 21 as a TV newsreader. But, you know, is it something which people are naturally born with, the ability to do? Because I can't remember a time where I was ever nervous in front of a camera. Or is it something that you can learn to do and you can become a master at it?
Deb Szabo: Absolutely. That's why I created Content Catalyst because I could see that people had these incredible businesses, they had these incredible stories. And I said, you know, you mentioned that in my bio. It's like, you know, when you start talking to people and then they start to tell you about their business, and I'm like, why doesn’t everyone know about this? And that was my thing, is I would talk to these incredible people, but no one knew about their story, and no one knew what they did. And so I wanted to help people uncover that. And so what I started to do was work on ways to bring people out of their shell. And so if I go back to 2020, we were doing live stream segments every Friday, and trying to get the team involved was like pulling teeth. It was like everyone had run for cover, you know? So it ended up being myself and the owner of the wine business I was working with. And so we did a segment, and then we dragged some of the team in there. And the reluctance of that is, what I find is it's easier for people to go on camera if there’s someone else. And so if you even think about podcasts, most, a lot of people that I talk to, they're like, just record a podcast. I’m like, if they only just recorded it, they would get so much more mileage out of it. And often they go, I can record it if I’m doing it with, like what we're doing now with somebody, but on their own, they really struggle with it. So, it's more about, if you're not used to talking on camera, then start with getting someone to come on camera with you, especially live streams as well. If you like live streams, I think they’re one of the most powerful things to create, like that personality, relationship, and rapport. And the techniques that I have come across when you are talking on camera, it's about planning, it's about going in and going, “What are the tools I need to appear more confident on camera?” And so things like having a teleprompter, if you're wanting to talk on camera, use a teleprompter, write out your script and use that. The most important thing in new video, if you're talking about social media, for example, are those first three seconds. You know you've got those first three seconds. And if you can, and even when, if you are doing a live stream, for example, know your hook. You know, like, I just recorded three podcast video episodes just before this. And the first thing I ask is, what is our hook? What is our opening line? So if you can nail that, then it makes it so much easier to then be able to have conversation from there. And then the other thing is, there’s just techniques that I look, we don’t start confident, but it’s having that courage to just show up every day. Stories and Instagram are the best way to start building your confidence and just have conversation.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So many great tips. And it’s very similar that, you know, we talk about the hook and that opening line. It's the same when you're writing a press release or up and doing a keynote speech because, yeah, you've got to grab them in that opening 60 seconds if you're doing a speech or that opening line because journalists get lots of press releases every day. Let's talk about the different—I’ve got so many questions to ask you. Oh, my goodness, my head is just racing. But let’s talk about the different mediums, because nowadays it’s TikTok, there’s Instagram, there’s Facebook, there’s YouTube, there’s LinkedIn. What should people prioritise? I know everyone can't, you know, really focus on them all. So should they prioritise one particular social media platform?
Deb Szabo: Yes and no. And I say that because I was thinking about this very thing this morning. I think at the moment, the last year, I've really worked on building up an Instagram platform, like with my business when I started it. So I started from zero and I just kept posting reels every day and that was my main focus. And the reason why I chose Instagram is because it was the best way to build community because of stories and you could have connections. So even though I don’t, like, necessarily have a massive following right now on Instagram, and I say right now, like, that just changes really quickly because that’s social media, but what I do have is a really loyal following. So when I post something up, I have a really engaged audience, and when I go to sell something and I offer something people buy. So you don’t need a lot of people, you just need the right people. Then, and so I experiment with all the different platforms. Right. So then if I go over to LinkedIn, I’m, like, completely different audience, completely different messaging, different vibe. And, so, again, the reaction that I get from that is very different. Then I go over to TikTok, and TikTok fascinates me at the moment. I love TikTok for the reason of what it's doing. I've been following the whole American election at the moment, and Kamala Harris, the movement on there is just mind-blowing. I just love watching all of this unfold on TikTok specifically.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah.
Deb Szabo: Have you followed this at all?
Jaimie Abbott: No, I haven’t.
Deb Szabo: Okay. There is this massive movement, like, she will become president based on TikTok and what that has made for her popularity. She has got a fan club out there creating, fundraising. They, through TikTok, they were able to do a Zoom meet. I think it was for 4,000 people. They reached maximum capacity. Then they, somebody knew the boss of Zoom. Then he opened it up to 10,000. They raised $100 million in 24 hours from TikTok, from the momentum in there. And then it went to black women, hashtag black women. Then it was white women, then it was black men, and then white men, and now it’s everyone. So this is a movement that’s happened in the last two weeks. I am so fascinated with how this is unfolding. So the message then becomes like—and this all came from a singer called Charli XCX. Right? And so she had called Kamala “brat.” So the next thing, and her team are amazing because they jump on something that's happening now. And that’s the most important thing, is that agility. So when a trend is happening, if you can jump on that, that’s so powerful. And that’s exactly what they did. They changed her branding colours to this green and black, which is what Charli XCX was talking about, with her colours and so they just went down the momentum. So TikTok is definitely a platform to watch because it’s a great search engine. It’s one of the biggest search engines in the world now. And it’s aged up where four years ago it was 15-year-olds, now there’s a whole movement on there of hash Gen X. Look that up. And so I just love what I love what's unfolding online of how the power of social media can influence movement. So, yeah, I think for me, it's about picking one of your platforms that you’ll gravitate to, because if you are a TikTok person, you will build an amazing audience and the style of content over there, if that's your content, if that's your platform, first, you will create a different style of content than, say, over on LinkedIn or Instagram. And I know we've had this discussion about quantity versus quality. I think it's both.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah. Okay. I feel like people are a lot nicer on Instagram than they are on TikTok. There’s some cowboys on TikTok, that’s for sure. Are you saying that, just out of interest, because I've completely shut off from American politics, I just had my head down, buried in the sand when it comes to it, which is unusual for me. So are you saying that, excuse the ignorant question for those of us who aren’t following Kamala Harris along, is Donald Trump not on there? Is he not taking advantage of TikTok and the audience?
Deb Szabo: There he is on there. He is on there. But what's actually happened? So when, and I don’t follow, like, I'm not into American politics, but because of what’s playing out from a, from a, I guess, social media observer, I’m fascinated with the power of people. And so when Joe Biden was running with Trump, it was so easy to, like meme Joe Biden. So his popularity dwindled and his credibility dwindled because there were so many things caught on camera, on video that people had taken and then ran with and discredited him. So, of course, Trump looked really good. Right. And now what's happened, with everything that's happened, as soon as he stood aside and let Kamala come on, Trump's popularity has backfired on him. And so his popularity, like, he was speaking at a conference, and he was just put on the spot, shut down. Like, yeah, your credibility is nothing. So it's—the scales have completely, like, tipped. It's, yeah, like I said, I'm fascinated.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah, that sounds really fascinating. So, I mean, speaking of, we didn't really say flop, but I do want to ask you, because on your one sheet, one of the topics that you talk about is why your content flops.
Deb Szabo: Yeah.
Jaimie Abbott: Is there a simple answer to that? Like, why people’s content flops? And, you know, because we’ve all—I’ve had some reels have, you know, 30,000 views and others have got 400. You know, what is it about some content that can be a real winner and then in other cases, literally, it does flop? Why is that?
Deb Szabo: Look, I've spent the last year, particularly when I set up Content Catalyst, of like really analysing and experimenting what’s working and what's not. If I go before that, my formula has always been, you know, have a good hook. What's your introduction? What’s in it for me? Explain the benefits. What's the value and the call to action. That's the simplistic part of a good video or any good headline like article or anything like that still follows that same formula. But if I look at what works and what doesn’t, like you said, the reels that you think the less about actually do the best. Right. I’ve known there’s been times that I’m like, “Oh, should I really post that? Stupid. I’m not going to post it.” And then it’s gone nuts. Right? Ridiculous. And then other times, the ones that you've put all this work into, like, goes nowhere. Hate that. Hate that. Right. And so I have analysed all the things that work and don’t work. It changes all the time. I also work with other mentors and creators of that, that do, you know, viral videos and specialise in viral videos. And there is a formula and the formula is all about—it’s about seven steps in the formula. So if you break down that again, it does come back to the hook. But you've got to really understand the pain points of your audience, really articulate that value and then come into that transformation and then the call to action. And if you miss out those steps, you know, you can still put up a bit of B-roll with some text and if it's funny, it’ll get lots of views, but it may not necessarily get the sales.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah, okay. Yeah. So speaking of the steps, do you have any sort of advice on the steps with the journey of people when they go to your website? Should there be a video on the welcome page, a video on the about page, a video on the—if they download your lead magnet and the welcome email they get, should there be a video on that? I mean, should we have a video as part of our marketing strategy every step of the way in our marketing funnel?
Deb Szabo: What’s really interesting is I was looking up some recent research of how people buy and whether they watch videos to help them buy. And 87% of customers say it helped with their buying decision by watching a video. So if you think about that from conversion, and I know this because one of the clients I work with, I analyse all the analytics of emails. So if I look at your website, yeah, you want to have a good product video. You want to have a sales video. So if you’re selling something like an online course, you want to have a video that tells people more about it. I love having videos in emails. And so if I put a video on YouTube and I put that information in the email to say, “Hey, learn more about this product here,” I can see the analytics and the click-through rates and I also know like I just did a campaign with one of my clients and in four days we sold like $50,000 worth of product from four videos.
Jaimie Abbott: Wow.
Deb Szabo: Like, that is the power of a good, well-crafted, strategic sales video.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a lot of time, like very time-consuming though. So what do you say to people who think, “I don't have the time to be recording, editing all these videos?” Is there a shortcut? I mean, I obviously talk about batching, but is there some sort of shortcut with using AI or anything like that that we can take advantage of with technology to be able to get this content out there quickly?
Deb Szabo: Yeah, that is one of the things for me, you know, time is the essence. Like seriously, I run out of time. That's often why I do live streams is because I don’t have time and I don’t have to edit. So this week I've got a sales—I'm running a video challenge to help people create a sales video at the moment. And leading up to it, I haven't had a lot of time to actually, you know, craft out these reels to let people know. So I've created one sales video and then I've repurposed it down into shorter clips and into vertical clips. So it's on my website now as a landscape one, but then I've short-clipped it down. I've taken little sound bites out of it for social media that I can keep dropping in. So if you can create that one hero piece of video, then you can snip it up and keep sprinkling it out. And that’s what we did with that last campaign. We had four videos, but I captured it all in one go and then, divvied it up and sprinkled it out. The other thing I’ll say is, my other tip is that if you can create a 120-minute video a week, that’s well researched based on the problems that you solve and what people are looking up, if you can just press Zoom, go on Zoom, press record on your phone, you don’t need anything fancy. If you’ve got a webcam, do that, have a well-crafted layout of what to talk about with your video in those steps I mentioned, identify the problem. You’ve got a 120-minute video. That 120-minute video can give you over 20 pieces of content marketing. So that's the quantity. But the quality is in that original video. That it comes from an evergreen piece of content that sits on YouTube, gives you all the SEO discoverability, and that’s what’s changing as well. How people search is changing. And so it’s really important to be found in these places because of the way AI is scraping things. So last night I recorded a podcast and I was able to download it, edit it, put it on YouTube, on my podcast, send out a, do a blog, LinkedIn newsletter, five pieces of social media stories in three hours.
Jaimie Abbott: Wow.
Deb Szabo: That would normally take days. And that's from using AI, like the AI video editors as well. Like, I’m not just talking about ChatGPT, you know, I’m a fan of Perplexity AI. I think it’s just next level as far as the information. But because I've got all that information already in there, the more you train the monkey as it would be, the better that information. I never copy and paste, but it's getting so good at understanding. I don’t have to change a lot in there now because of how well it's understanding me and I'm using, and it's using my transcription as well, so it is using my actual language from that video. So that’s the quality versus then the quantity gets distributed out to all the touch points. So that's where you need to be in those points. And the reason is, I don't know. Have I spoken to you about that? Google. There's a research from Google about the 7-11-4 rule. And that is essentially to take a stranger to a buyer, it takes seven hours of research, over eleven different touch points. So that could be an email, Instagram stories, your LinkedIn post, whatever it is. It’s eleven touch points over four different locations. So they might come into your business, they might read a review, word of mouth, whatever. And that's the journey that it takes to go from stranger to buyer. That's the modern buyer journey now.
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah. Wow.
Deb Szabo: So if you're only doing an Instagram tile, like doing a Canva Instagram tile and you're posting that up every day, I think I worked out it's going to take you two and a half years to achieve that seven hours. Two and a half years?
Jaimie Abbott: Yeah.
Deb Szabo: Because that’s how long, like if you calculate the time, somebody’s only going to look at a Canva tile for three seconds and they scroll on. Okay, they might get 10 seconds if it's a carousel. But a video, like I did a whole calculation of it and I ran it through Perplexity, by the way, to ask me to give me, “How does it get, how can I get to seven hours?” And if you just made a 120-minute video a week, and you did, and I’m talking about if you wanted to grow your business, right, so you're in growth phase, 120-minute video a week, you will get to that seven hours in just one month.
Jaimie Abbott: Wow, that sounds so easy, but yet so powerful. Yeah. Well, this is—this is dropping on Monday, the 12th of August. And right now you're in launch. Tell us about how people can get into your world. What are you running? What offers have you got at the moment if people want to learn more from you?
Deb Szabo: Yeah, look, one of the things we were just talking about, when do we have time to make a sales video? Well, now, right now I’m literally running a four-day free coaching week where you can come and make a sales video with me because like we never have time, we always put it off and I did it myself so I figured I might as well just like do a video challenge and I'm going to coach people for free how to research their videos. So you get your messaging right and plan out a well-crafted video. So I'm going to take you through how to do some B-roll, text captions, all those things to make it engaging. Then we're going to film on the third day using your phone and then we're going to edit it on the fourth day. So you've got a video that you can upload to your website, social media, Facebook ads, all the things.
Jaimie Abbott: Great. And how do they find that? What's the website link for that?
Deb Szabo: So that's debszabo.com. But no one can ever spell my name. So it’s my video. So I've made a URL for the week, which is thevideochallenge.com.
Jaimie Abbott: Oh, that's so easy. Thevideochallenge.com.
Deb Szabo: Thevideochallenge.com.
Jaimie Abbott: Love it. Thank you so much, Deb Szabo. Anything else further to add? I mean, I know there's so much we could do.
Deb Szabo: A whole week. Shops on.
Jaimie Abbott: It’s important, you know, most of the people who listen are business owners, marketing experts. Anything else we can add there that you want to throw in?
Deb Szabo: I'm just going to say use your phone, pick up your phone and record a video, because you will. Yeah. It's the quickest and easiest way and fastest way to build your business, basically, and your personal brand.
Jaimie Abbott: Thank you so much, Deb Szabo, for being a guest today here on Pitch Perfect.
Deb Szabo: Thank you for having me.
