004 Greg Rollett: Owning Your Own Media

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In this episode, Barbara Hales and Greg Rollett discuss:

The importance for business professionals to own their own media content
Cost-effective strategies to create, post and promote online media
How media sets businesses apart from competitors within the same field

 Key Takeaways:

A professional’s most effective marketing tool for building relationships with clients is utilizing videos
Videos need to be produced consistently and on an established frequency to continue engaging clients
The strategy for building an audience for media visibility is to upload it to Facebook, YouTube and Over the Top apps including Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon.

“You should be good at what you do, you should take care of your patients, you should have good customer service, but that’s not good enough. What is good enough is ‘Do I have a relationship with my doctor?’.” — Greg Rollett

  Transcription

004 Greg Rollett- Owning Your Own Media

Barbara Hales: Hi, this is Barbara Hales. We have the good fortune to be speaking today with Greg Rollett. Greg, you have the Ambitious Academy. Could you tell us how that came about?

Greg Rollett: Kind of a long story, but I’ll make it short. I promise is that we were hanging out with a guy by the name of Peter Diamandis is who is the founder of the X Prize and one of his hobbies since he’s bored is he sends rocket ships to asteroids and mines them down to the earth. That’s his like side gig, side business if you will.

We were in his office on a consulting day and he was with myself, my business partner Nick, and we were doing all this stuff in the media, but we were buying media. Meaning that when we were running ads in magazines, newspapers, we were renting their media and he said, “Hey, if you really want to grow exponentially, you should own the media instead of playing on someone else’s media.”

It was a really interesting concept to us and Nick and I started brainstorming, starting playing with it, and an opportunity came up to buy ambitious.com and we went forward. We purchased it and we decided that we wanted to build that into our own media network. That way we own and control the media. Now over the past, so we just had our two year birthday with that as we’re recording this. Now, the cool thing is we now have over 75 online courses of which your is one of them, Content Marketing Made Easy.

We have over 75 courses. We now have over a dozen TV shows that we host on the network and it’s really become this place that entrepreneurs, experts, professionals can come and create content, but also have a home for their content. It was this idea of owning the media instead of using someone else’s media. Which I think is really important for the professionals that you work with because again, a lot of them they’re running newspaper ads there, which is someone else’s newspaper. You don’t own that newspaper, you’re buying time in there. By doing things like you’re doing, like with this podcast, with your newsletter, with your TV show, with whatever it is, that’s media that you own and control. I think that’s one of the most powerful things that a business owner could do today.

Barbara Hales: I think that was so sensible. By the way, happy professional birthday.

Greg Rollett: Thanks.

Barbara Hales: The next question I have for you is, can doctors and dentists benefit by having their own TV show? How would that work to attract patients?

Greg Rollett: Yeah, it’s a great question. I believe especially in the professional services business, most of us we are doing a service that someone else down the street can kind of do too. If I’m a chiropractor, there’s probably 50 other chiropractors within a certain mile radius of our town and they can all adjust our back. I’m using generalities. Like everybody has their own little system their own, but for the lay person, you’re like, all right, well this person’s $100 for an adjustment and this person’s $60 for an adjustment. I’m just going to go to the person who’s $60 an adjustment.

What can you do then if everybody has the same skills, everybody has the same degrees, everyone kind of has the same offer? What can you do to differentiate yourself? I believe the only true way to differentiate yourself is you as a person. That’s the only true USP is yourself and your story.

As people, we relate to people. Some people are watching this and they’re like, “Who is this guy? He’s talking a hundred miles an hour. He’s using his hands,” and they’re turned off by that. Other people love it because I talk at a fast pace and they liked the energy. It’s my personality that really attracts people. I’m not the only person on the planet that’s saying, use media, create TV shows, great podcasts. There’s a lot of people out there. The one thing that attracts people to us and to our business is our personality. I think doctors, Medicare, healthcare professionals, all service professionals, we forget that. We think that it’s about great service, but those should be a given.

You should be great at what you do or else you shouldn’t be practicing medicine. You should be good at what you do. You should take care of your patients. You should have good customer service, but that’s not good enough. What is good enough is do I have a relationship with my doctor? Do I have a relationship with my physical therapist? Do I have a relationship with my chiropractor?

I believe that as the amount of paperwork that keeps growing in the practice, the amount of work that you have to do, the number of patients that you need to see, it’s hard to have that intimate one-on-one relationship. If Barbara, if you were one of my patients, I can’t spend two hours with you and get your whole life story in today’s day can’t do that. I believe that media is the best way to really create that connection and build that relationship with your patients.

There’s no better medium to create that relationship than with video because if you were just reading this interview right now, it’s not as engaging as seeing me and seeing you. They’re watching the video, or even if they’re listening to the podcast, they’re hearing my voice in fluxion. They’re hearing me speed up or slow down, or become very emotional, or whatever the case is. That’s the best way to create a relationship.

The cool thing is that if you have, let’s say a thousand patients, you can send an email to those thousand patients, say, “Hey, check out the latest episode of my show where I uncover the five things you need to do to have a healthy summer.” Now they watch that video. Well now you just had an intimate conversation with those thousand patients without actually taking up your time.

Media can multiply you, which is very important because we can’t have those long conversations with everyone. It’s just not physically possible. I believe that video is that best medium because right now there’s a connection. You get to see me, you can see my facial expressions, you see my eyes, you see how I light up in different situations. Then that is what’s really going to differentiate yourself as opposed to again, just saying that you have the best customer service.

Well you should have good customer service. That’s why you’re in business. You should know how to adjust my back. You should know how to take my temperature and hit my knee with a little hammer. You should know those things, but what I want to know is does my doctor care about the same things I do? Do we have the same beliefs? Do we have the same values? Is he a huge sports fan? Does he support the local community? Does he have kids? How does he deal with when his own kids get sick?

All of those things can be addressed in a video show and a TV show. Where you get to share, “Hey, last week it was a graduation and everybody was playing and they caught a cold. Here’s the three things that I did with my kids,” and now you’re like, whoa, the doctor is just like me. The doctor is doing things that I would doing and getting that across on video I think is so important. So hopefully that answered the question long-winded, but hopefully it really helpful.

Barbara Hales: Well you really hit the nail on the head. It’s so important nowadays for doctors to relate to their patients and patients feel that they’re engaged with their physicians as we transition into a more patient centric model of medicine. Tell me something, it’s easy to say doctors should have a TV show, but how would they go about it? How could you help them?

Greg Rollett: A couple of things. We need to overcome fear of getting on camera first, because he’s like, “Well I’m a doctor. I don’t need to get on camera.” We have this fear of being perfect and I don’t think that it’s about being perfect. I think more importantly, it’s about consistently bringing content to your marketplace and doing it constantly because the more you’re on top of someone’s mind, the more they’re going to remember you, the more they’re going to refer, the more they’re going to come in and see you again.

It’s not about being perfect. It’s about consistently being who you are and just sharing that message. That’s the first fear we need to overcome is the fear of getting on camera and the fear of I’m a doctor, so every word needs to be perfect, and it needs to be scripted out and that’s not what people want. People want you to be real. They want you to be human. They want you to interact.

We will forgive a mistake, or a flub, or a fumble or you saying, I say, you know, like too many times I just, I do, but that’s who I am. I think that’s what creates the relationship is the flaws, not necessarily the perfectionism. We need to overcome that fear of getting on camera. I think that that’s step one.

The second step in order to overcome those fears is you got to know what to say. Most doctors are like, “Well I don’t know what to say. I’m going to shoot a video, what am I going to talk about? This knee procedure that I did last week.” We need to create a simple formula to help doctors to create these episodes.

I love creating weekly episodes and that for me creates constancy and consistency. Constancy is constantly being in front of your marketplace and most doctors will send out maybe a monthly newsletter. To me like, well a month there’s 29 other days where other people are communicating with your marketplace. If you do it weekly then at least you’re hitting them again every single week. I like weekly.

Then consistency is making sure that you continue to do it because a lot of times we get hot and heavy. I know you teach a lot of like press release strategies and article strategies, and they come on, and they onboard, and you help them out and they do like four or five articles. They get some traction and then what do they do? They stop right.

Barbara Hales: That’s absolutely true. Well, let’s say you have helped them decide how to script this show what they need to talk about. How do you get an audience for them? There’s no fun in having a TV show if there’s no one watching it.

Greg Rollett: Yeah. I’m going to try my best to not to get super technical here, but once you shoot the video, you’ve actually scripted it, you’ve got it shot. There’s three places that I think you should put it. One is your Facebook page. For the practice, not your personal page, but the practice page. Let’s place number one.

Place two is you should have a YouTube channel for your practice as well. What you really want to do is you want to upload it directly to Facebook and you want to upload it directly YouTube because they’re competitors. Facebook doesn’t like it if you take a YouTube link and put it on Facebook because they’re like, “Well why do we want YouTube getting ad revenue? We want the ad revenue.” So, you want to upload it to your Facebook page and you want to upload it to YouTube.

Then kind of the third place that we like right now is what’s called over the top apps and that would be like Apple TV, Roku, Amazon, things like that. I’m not going to get super technical again, but if you just Google how to get my TV show or how to get my videos on Apple TV, it’ll walk you through the process and there’s a bunch of cool services that will help you to do that. Those are the three places.

Now what I like about YouTube is that’s the place where someone’s going to type in. I have these symptoms in Orlando, Florida. Or how to get my knee repaired in Sarasota or whatever the case is. YouTube is where you’re going to get that organically keyword based traffic, all right.

On Facebook, this is what we’re going to do on Facebook is we are going to A, we are going to put it there and we’re going to share it. We’re going to have maybe our staff share it. We’re going to share it, and we’re going to get a bunch of people to share it.

The second thing that we’re going to do is we’re actually going to buy advertising. Imagine that. We’re going to buy advertising to get patients and we’re not talking about a big spend. If you’re putting out a show every single week and let’s say you have a thousand patients, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take that patient list out of whatever database that you’re using. We’re going to upload it to Facebook and we’re going to say, “Hey Facebook, these are all of my patients. Will you show them my video?” And Facebook will show them your video for about a penny to two pennies to get each person to watch it. If you have a thousand people at let’s say two pennies, I’m trying to do math, that’s like what, $20 I think.

Barbara Hales: That sounds very reasonable.

Greg Rollett: Somewhere in there. Let’s say you’re going to spend $20 to $25 every single week to get your thousand best patients to watch your video. That’s a pretty good use of money. In my case, because maybe your patient will watch it, maybe they’ll share it with a friend, maybe they’ll say, “Oh, you know what, Dr. Hales just shared a really good video. I need to call her about my knee or about my hip,” or whatever the case is.

Then we’re also going to do some really cool things and I know you teach this and a lot of what you do is, teaching articles, teaching blog writing, things like that. If you’re writing blogs, well why isn’t one of your blogs one of your videos? So, you can go to YouTube and you can take the embed code and you can put it on your blog, and you can write out some words and things like that, and you teach a lot of that in your courses and now they have a blog post with that video on it.

You talk a lot about newsletters, things like that. Well in your patient newsletter that you send out, why don’t you have a link to one of your videos? Lots of different strategies to get them to watch it. Some paid, some free, and some that have to do with content marketing, but I think you definitely want your patients to watch it. You definitely want your prospects to watch it.

Then the final strategy would then be getting the unknown to watch it. Just people in your community, people in your town, and again, you can use Facebook advertising. If you are running in the newspaper, why don’t you say, “Hey, if you like this, why don’t you go to YouTube and check out our weekly show where we share the best tips to help keep our community healthy.” Things like that. Lots of different ways because you’re right, having a show is cool, it’s great. Hey, I’m a doctor and I got my own TV show. What’s better is having people watch that show and then talk and say, “Hey Dr. Hales, I saw your show and I’m here.” That’s the best thank you that you can possibly get in this world.

Barbara Hales: That’s great. If someone decides that they would like to work with you and develop their own show, do they have to come to where you are or do you work with them remotely?

Greg Rollett: Yeah, that’s a great question. How we help folks to do this is we actually, I’m a big fan of batch, work in batches. That’s the sat word I was looking for today. We like to be works in batches because as a doctor you’re super busy and so for you to be creative every single week, that’s kind of tough.

What we do is we bring in professionals here actually into this studio and Barbara, you were here doing a course with us just a couple of weeks ago. We actually do 13 episodes of your TV show in one day and that basically gives you an entire quarter’s worth of video every week for 13 weeks. An entire quarter, and we do it all in one day. So, you don’t have to be sacrificing a lot of time out of the office, things like that. The most affordable way for you to do it is actually to come into our studio because we have the studio here. We have all the camera guys here, we have all the equipment. We can just flick a switch and the lights turn on and it’s very cost effective.

We can come to your office, but it adds some expense to it. Meaning we have to, depending where you are, we got to fly out our crew, we’ve got to fly out all the gear things like that. There are some travel costs that occur with it, but we can definitely do it at your office, but we have an incredible studio and incredible set here where we film the majority of our TV shows.

Again, the cool thing for you as the healthcare professional, as the professional is we do it all in one day. You really get a lot of leverage for your time. That way you’re not out of the office, you’re not missing a lot of work because as a healthcare professional, if you’re not working with a patient, I know you’re not getting paid that day. We want to minimize that time that you’re away from the office.

Barbara Hales: That’s great Greg. So just tell our audience today how they can reach you and set this up with you.

Greg Rollett: Thanks so much for that. Yeah, they can go to ambitiousmediagroup.com/tv and they can learn all about the program. Everything that comes along with it. They can also go to a ambitious.com/hales which is your last name, H-A-L-E-S. We put together a really cool package where they can get a copy of a magazine, one of our bestselling books, and a training video that goes through this entire process. If they’re like, “Hey, I really want to do a TV show.” They can go to ambitiousmediagroup.com/tv or they can go to ambitious.com/hales, H-A-L-E-S, and they can get a really cool package that we put together just for listeners of your show.

Barbara Hales: Well, thank you so much, Greg. It was really a pleasure having you on the show.

Connect with Greg Rollett:  

Twitter: @gregrollett

Facebook: @gregrollett

Website: www.ambitiousmediagroup.com

Email: info@ambitious.com

YouTube: Greg Rollett

LinkedIn:   Greg Rollett

Book: Greg Rollett

Connect with Barbara Hales: 

Twitter:   @DrBarbaraHales

Facebook:   www.facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist