How to be an Exceptional Virtual Presenter – with Oli Gardner from Be the Keynote | DMR #260

Full transcript:

David Bain
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 260: How to be an exceptional virtual presenter.

Bot
Digital Marketing Radio with David Bain.

David Bain
I’m David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio with a podcast and YouTube show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top of that is as tools, tactics and trends I shared by today’s modern marketing masters.

How many times over the last 17 months have you turned up to yet another zoom meeting, only to hear a cacophony of nonsense and a presenter struggling to share their slides?

So you say to yourself, if that were me, I’d be so much better. And the week after, it’s your turn. So you start your presentation, fully on forum, and completely muted!

Virtual presentation skills are no more important than ever. And that’s exactly what I’m gonna be discussing with my guests on Digital Marketing Radio Episode 260. He is the co founder of unbounce. The landing page platform utilised by over 15,000 brands. And nowadays, you can find them helping you to become a better and more confident presenter whether it’s on a big stage, a tiny stage or a virtual stage. Welcome to DMR Ollie Gardner.

Oli Gardner
Thanks for having me on David. 260! That’s a lot of episodes.

David Bain
It’s a lot of episodes. Yeah, thank you very much. And there was a bit of a gap going on as well actually, because I didn’t just about every week or even more often than that between 2014 2017 took a big gap. And then now I’m restarting again. But it’s good restarting again. You need to know I guess when to take a bit of a breather. But that doesn’t seem to be like yourself. You’re you’re straight from inbounds on to unbind sorrow onto onto another project here. So says it’s a no gap for yourself at all.

Oli Gardner
Yeah, I’m still part time. And I’m bands. So it’s a lot of juggling. But I’ve I’ve had this, you know, this idea bubbling for a while. And yeah, we actually had like a partial exit on balance. We you know, we sold about half the company to private equity. So, it just gave the opportunity like, okay, now is the time I’ll go part time I’ll start this. And yeah, it’s, it’s I don’t you mean, it’s tiring, just going straight into something else. But I have so much excitement about it, you know, it’s coming. It’s hitting me now. Because I am getting up at 4am right now, because I have so much to do. And I used to stay up till 4am. But then how to get now on the early side.

Okay. Okay, I can relate with you. Yes. Well, I hope you managed to keep on going I’m sure you will. Because you’re you’re particularly enthusiastic, I think about this particular topic, and that is public speaking skills. So So why are public speaking skills are so important? It’s it can have a massive impact on your confidence in your career. And before the realm of people who want to do it was a bit limited to those who want to go on stage and become a public speaker. But now, it because of the pandemic because everything’s gone virtual, it affects everybody, everybody is in that position where they’re presenting, whether it’s an actual slide deck, or give him a meeting, he or just like an update or something, or an or real, full blown presentation for, you know, an online event, it hits everybody. And most people are really bad at it. And it’s not their fault. But it’s very difficult. And virtual is so different to doing it in the real world. You alluded to some of it, but there are so many technical things that can go wrong. There’s so many mistakes you can make, because you don’t even know how you should be doing it properly. And I just want to help people, you know, become more confident, be more successful and succeed more but also for the sake of people watching. So they can have a better experience and not sit through those awfully run, you know, presentations that we Yes, I think we’ve we’ve all been through quite a few of them recently. And it’s frustrating when people are actually quite good at talking or supposed to be quite good presenters, but then they switch to online and they’re even worse than they ever were, which is quite concerning and frustrating for the viewer. So on your website, be the keynote.com you give an absolutely wonderful guide to giving virtual presentations on zoom. And I love the fact that you don’t even ask for an email option for people to read that. Well, why is that on you?

Right and public speaking is such an established concept the getting on page One of Google for that term now protein, me yours, but my only because I’m suing you, and I’m gonna need so much content before I can rank. So my entire goal with that was that was to have the biggest, most authoritative content on the topic. And I was kind of having a tagline with the release is I don’t expect you to read it, but I do hope you’ll link to it. So it’s my link building play, I’m making a completely open in the hope that people will go, that’s amazing. Whenever I’m thinking of writing about doing more virtual presentations, I will link that.

David Bain
So it’s a great piece of content. And it’s a beautiful piece of content as well, you know, it looks visually very appealing, certainly, as well. And you obviously come from a background of designing visually appealing landing pages anyway as well. So how about we zero in on some of the key elements within the guide, it’s impossible to to go over everything just now. But I, I went through it, and I picked out a few elements that particularly appealed to me. And I guess, I hope that it’ll appeal appeal to the listener or the viewer as well. So number one, in the virtual presentation do’s was test your slides from the attendee perspective. So many people, our guests, share their slides and can’t share their slides or ended up sharing them from a presenter perspective, is that a very common issue, you’re just missing a massive piece of context, if

Oli Gardner
you if you don’t look, it’s the whole, you know, UX, walk in your customers shoes, it’s the same thing. The software will do things you don’t expect on the viewer side. And there’s a lot of technical things that can go wrong. So I suggest that people log in, say, it’s on zoom, you log into the software twice, I’ve, you know, start a meeting, have your Presenter View, do everything you would, and then have another, you know, another laptop or something and I whatever you have, and then log into that meeting with that. So you can see how you look, you know, does the background change the angle change? How do my slides look, because there are many things that can go wrong. If you have any animations or transitions in your slides, there’s a very good chance they will work. Virtually, they’ll either be, you know, completely jerky to the point where it’s wasted, and it looks terrible, or it just won’t happen at all. So then you can go, Okay, that’s not going to work, I’ll take that out to speed things up and make it better. If you have video, the same kind of thing can happen. But more importantly, most of the time depends on your setup, the audio will not work. And unless you’re experiencing that, you’re not going to know the reason that happens if you’ve got if you’re using your laptop, and it’s default microphone, which you should never do, because it sounds like garbage. But if you have anything else plugged in and mic up here, whatever it is levelling, or just your headphones, that goes into the mic socket, that cancels out the system audio playing from your slides, it’s impossible for to go through, unless you use software, like loopback or VB, audio or something. audio cable, basically, that’s virtual audio software. Yeah, it can, you can say I want the input from my mic, I want the input from keynote, or PowerPoint and chrome or whatever. And it pipes them all into one single audio source, which is what you choose in the software and zoom or whatever the platform is, instead of your microphone, you choose that then it combines everything, and everything will run smoothly. But unless you’ve gone through that or tested it, you’re gonna be in that moment where like, you’re gonna have people typing in the chat, we can’t hear nothing. And you’re gonna get so flustered in the moment and go like I don’t know how to deal with this. I used to present webinars with a wireless headset like Janet Jackson and a style. And I hadn’t figured out this problem yet. So people were saying in the chat, and then on Twitter’s live, we can’t hear you. So at the end of the day, what what do I have to do? I had to basically lean Oh yeah, I needed the audio from laptops to go through my mic. So the only thing I could do was lean into my laptop, my face next to the speaker. So that it would go through this and into the audience and it just looks ridiculous. It makes people laugh, but winging it can be difficult I survived that one. And after that I started just doing as a bit of a joke until I discovered this virtual audio input software which changed everything and it’s great cuz you can bounce the audio, your mic and the audio came from the slides or whatever. So the it’s got a nice balance. It’s not too loud or quiet because that’s another thing with virtual presenting a lot of people will have headphones in. If you’re too loud, suddenly, they’ll be shocked. Like they’ll either stop paying attention or they’ll turn it down and then your next Has audio, maybe it’s quiet, and then they can hear it up again. And it’s just a terrible experience, you need to have your audio files.

David Bain
Absolutely, I actually use virtual audio cable, which I think is what you’re talking about there just to generate another audio out. Because I mix so many different sources of audio as well. I’ve used voice metre banana in the past, which is a great piece of software for doing that as well. I currently use v mix for putting together different video and audio together. And you can really go a different level there are as well ones, when you do your presenting through that. And you can start to do things like natively play videos and know that the audio is going to come from the video that you’re playing. And it’s wonderful. However, the more things that you balance up, the more things that can go wrong. And you have to be comfortable with dealing with things as they do go wrong, because they go wrong for me after several years in the game. And I’m sure if we used all, and it’s just about how you deal with it. And you alluded to your nice relaxed reaction to the issue that you had with your audio, did you think about that reaction beforehand, or were you just experienced enough to be able to cope with it at the time

Oli Gardner
it was experienced, and anyone who’s seen me present live more than once will know that I have a very technical deck slide decks, I really push them to the absolute limit of what they can do. Say it’s it’s very common that if there’s a tech problem at a conference, it will happen to me, I become very experienced in dealing with that mess. And so yeah, that definitely helped. That something like I’m creating a course and a product x then moving into a kind of a SaaS product would be the keynote. And part of it is it’s basically all about presentation experience design, it’s about what you do before you create your slide deck, because people jump into slides and that and then it’s like, writer’s block, you know, the blank page like I don’t want to do and they end up using the default templates look like absolute shit. And then they just go gets worse from their presentation experience design is about designing your presentation or creating the structure doing everything beforehand. So when you get in your slide software, you know exactly what to do. And one of the you define the kind of experience moments you want the audience to have, and you design them purposely into your talk. One of the layers to that is what I call, you know when poop hits the fan. So you can basically you identify all of the places in your presentation where there is a possibility that something will go wrong. And then you think about, and you practice what you’ll do, if that happens. So you’re completely prepared. You can make it funny, you can solve the problem, whatever it is, but when you know where it can happen, and you’ve learned how to deal with it. It can be a completely different experience, and you build your level of experience, your how you deal with it way more quickly. And you’ll Yeah, you’ll just create a better experience for the audience.

David Bain
Absolutely. And don’t ever expect to be completely perfect before you get started. Otherwise, you’ll never get started. So I guess you’d agree with that.

Oli Gardner
Absolutely. I mean, the first aspect of becoming a presenter is the desire to be better at it, you don’t have to be better now, but just wanting to become better. That little moment of deciding that is a big deal. And then, you know, the next step is to congratulate yourself for the decision to become a speaker in whatever format because it’s terrifying for almost everybody. And it’s hard. And, you know, you should be proud of yourself that you’ve decided to make that that leap because it’s something a lot of people don’t do even if they want to because they’re so scared. imposter syndrome is a massive deal. For a lot of people, you know, the belief that I’m not good enough, you know, why do I deserve to be on that stage? Why should people be listening to me? And I suffered for that for about five years, I turned on every speaking gig request. And my fear was that someone in the audience in a q&a session at the end of my talk would live on the spot. Is there always a bit awkward? You get this rambling six part question. You forget what it’s about. By the time they get to the end, you’re like, Ah, my fear was that someone would say, Well, how do you know? How do you know that’s true? And no one I mean, I’ve travelled the world speaking so many places. Not once Has anyone come even remotely close to asking a question like that? Yeah. That held me back and if I knew that, that was just nonsense. I may have done it more. Quickly, you know, but it’s Yeah, it’s a lot of people, I recommend anyone who does suffer from that. And that fear. There’s a talk by Tiffany de Silva. Just look that up. Bella stone is her handle on Twitter, she does talk related to that. And it’s inspirational. It’s absolutely fantastic. We had her TTA cough inventors conference. And I asked her specifically to do that talk, I saw her do it in, in Dublin learning band. And just it was not related to the topic of our conference, really, I just knew it was going to have a profound impact on people in the audience. And it did. They, you know, it’s encouraged people to watch that

David Bain
wonderful resource. Okay, I’ll try and find that and include that in the show notes as well. I think Confessions of a marketing fraud or something converted confessions of marketing fraud. Okay, I will attempt to write that down. And, and look that up afterwards. Something else that you mentioned, as part of your deck was to build a background set to make your virtual presentations look professional, and we’ve all been on virtual events, you know, reviewing them, where people have had their washing in the background or whatever, I guess what are one or two important things not to have and to have in your background.

Oli Gardner
First of all, don’t use a zoom background. Okay, they make it look weird, and they’re not professional, it’s finally meeting, go for it, a lot of the people watching a smaller amount of people, they’ll be doing it too, that’s fine. But just try and start constructing something, you know, you may not have much space in your your house wherever you get to do it. But just try try and find an angle that’s a little bit interesting, not too cluttered. And like I haven’t, like you have, one of the best things you can do is get on an angle, do not be straight to the you know, the wall behind you and the camera because it just looks very flat, and it makes it look like you’re getting, you know, you just got arrested and you’re getting that photo taken. So yeah, just having that offset, like you can see in the background here. And you know, a light in the background like that, it just creates a bit of interest, just start adding little things. And, again, open your software, open zoom, whatever it is, and make sure you can see yourself and go like, oh, how does this actually look. And all software’s different. Some will control in different ways, they’ll affect the lighting differently, or they may have a different zoom factor, my birth control that you might not be able to. So you need to, you know, experimentation and practice are just so key, especially with virtual, and the software you’re going to use and just yeah, just start making it a little more interesting over time. And so that whole thing again, watching from the audience’s view, so you can see what they’re gonna see, you know, like, so I’ve got big these are the core visor, amps now be the keynote, bell says that I love acronyms. And I spent a lot of time torturing what I wanted to call them specifically, so I could get that but I’ve been on I’ve been on presentations where this was backwards. So it just looked ridiculous. But in the last I’d seen that and then in the software tried to flip it, but you know, it just would have looked ridiculous. So yeah, you always got to try and do that. And honestly, if you have some plain boring rooms in your house, I I bet your spouse or partner whatever will not be dissatisfied. If you start making look better. Just put a little bit of effort.

David Bain
Absolutely. And you don’t have to spend loads on equipment. I’m a big fan of decent lighting as well. And certainly for the rest of wearing glasses. If you wear glasses, you need to make sure that your key light is is not dead centre it’s it’s off to the side and it is a bit of a more flattering light as well. So a few basic things like that only make a massive difference.

Oli Gardner
And it depends on the software like I have this set up mainly for my camera for recording and then sometimes zoom. Right now I’m bit too evenly balanced. Really kind of want to have about 50% on your fill light, you get that natural shadow, but one of the mistakes people make I mean, you should try and if you don’t have any specialist lighting, try and do on the cheap if you can’t afford it, there’s many things you can do Wistia lookup Wistia and like $100 setup or whatever, they have great advice about how to really cheap things. Go Home Depot and buy some super cheap stuff to get a great lighting setup. Just don’t do the vanity ring light thing is not an alien. You certainly don’t

David Bain
take killers. Yes. Yeah, I mean, do do it. Do something like 30 degrees to your front, slightly in top of you for your key for your key lines. I’ve got a newer key light and led one For LED light, and it’s it’s not that expensive it was about, I can’t remember 6070 pounds or something like that plus the stand, you mentioned your film light as well, it’s, it gives you the best quality lighting by having it to the side. So you have a natural shadow cast against your face to give you that more depth. And then your field light will just take away the harshness of that photo but shadow but still keep a little bit of it.

Oli Gardner
Yeah, and it’s a little bit extra money. But get a get a softbox on your light is I’ve seen LED lights, it can be a bit harsh, and you want to turn right down to the lowest Kelvin like to warmer, typically. But a softbox makes a big difference. And if you can’t afford one of those, then just use parchment paper or something, there’s lots of different things, you can just keep on the front of it to soften that and change the you know, make it a bit warmer. There’s a lot of stuff you can do.

David Bain
There’s another light that I normally have as well, but I don’t have one at the moment. And that’s called a rim light. And that just lights up your your little bit. Exactly, yes. Or behind you. Yeah, yeah, that 3d image a little bit more

Oli Gardner
UV careful out there. So it’s a little bit I saw a YouTube video of some guy who’d obviously just learned about that, because I saw previous videos, didn’t have it. And then he looked like an angel. It was just, it was so powerful. There’s just this giant glow. That’s a little do you want?

David Bain
Oh, definitely. I mean, it’s got to look natural. And if you’ve got lighting in your background, just to soften up and break up and have something different. Ideally, your rim light is going to be approximately from that direction. So it looks as if that lights just shining on your shoulders. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So one other thing that you cover is about the presentation purpose, reduce your big idea into a small one. And I guess, too many people try to cover too many things.

Oli Gardner
Yeah, and sometimes it’s about understanding what it’s about. And the one of the ways I encourage people to do this is when you have your talk idea, and you’re gonna start jumping to your slides, just get a Google doc or something and use bullet points and write down every single thing you want to sit like just this, this, this this in as much detail as you can just spew it all out, then maybe you see you’ve got 60 bullet points. Now the exercises, do it again, but you’re only allowed 30 distil it, then you’ll add 15, then you’ll add eight for two and you can get down to one, this is a great idea for a startup that allows you to take your idea and put it down to the absolute simplest way of communicating. And that should probably be a headline on your, on your you know, your homepage, your landing page that allows you to be able to communicate quickly, this is what my talk is, this is what it’s about. This is why I’m doing this. And this is a simple exercise, it’s a little bit of time, but the detail will give you all the things that I need this content in here, that distillation of purpose. It’s just a wonderful way of you understanding your topic in more depth as well going through an exercise. And, yeah, it’ll help you get to a good title as well. It’s important, especially for a multitrack event,

David Bain
is the idea of scenario to get to a stage where you don’t have any text on the slide at all, and you’re just using images.

Oli Gardner
Um, I mean, this is more for the concept. But in terms of that, the less text the better. I mean, the wall of text is the classic, awful experience where there’s 15 bullet points on the on a slide, they’re all there at the same time, if you can have bullet points and they’re fine, if you do it right, you only use the progressive reveal, I’ve got a great video on that, where you know, they come one by one. But as you go down, the rest of them fade out like 15% opacity. So as always highlight the one you’re talking about. There’s nothing worse just sitting in a meeting or presentation. And the speakers turn around and they’re reading from the slides because they have to because there’s so much text on there. Everyone else is reading ahead. There is like it’s boring, it’s not engaging, they’ve read faster, like, hey, I’ve got all that. Now I have nothing to do, and I’m gonna tune out. I see don’t want to have tonnes of text. If you do like the certain situations like they have a quote, people put quotes on their slides all the time, like famous quotes, don’t read it, speak to it, let them read it. But you give your perspective and talk about why that’s important or why you’re, you’re sharing that. Yeah, you should never be reading from your slides. And in a virtual presentation. Sometimes you’re going to have to like say there’s some detail and you want to you want to read it, you’ve got some notes, if you’re nervous, you might have notes. So what you want to do is eye contact is incredibly important with virtual presenting, because you don’t have an audience you can’t look at them and engage them you have to look at your camera. I have my camera like right in the middle of a screen behind here with some notes and I can see you it looks like I’m looking through the camera when I look at them. So you need the icon Contact. And if you have a tonne of detail on your slides you’re going to most people set up is they’ll have the webcam on their laptop. So then they’re doing this. And it’s very obvious that they’re looking down. If you need to do that, we want to maintain eye contact, ask the audience to look at the slide. So they’re not looking at you, they’re looking at the slide, same time as you. Or if you just need a quick reference, pretend you’re thinking, just kind of do it. You know, don’t have done you’re looking at the slide doesn’t need you to look at them. Because you’re pondering something, you’re being thoughtful and intelligent. It’s, you know, there’s little techniques like that, that can allow you to do that, if you love x, but yet, typically, if, yeah, breaking it down to something simpler. breaking out two more slides, if you have five points, make some bold statement, or an image wherever it is, on several slides and speak to them. Because people want to look into this world you’re communicating, they don’t want to look at it. You know, same if you have if you have a photo or something, don’t make a tiny like that on this big slide. It looks ridiculous. Make it fullscreen, do this search a bit harder to find a high res image or take them yourself. I talked about original content mindset. Always take your own photos, record your own videos, if you can put those in, and they’ll be high res. And then it’s immersive. You’re looking at sliders full, you’re looking into this world, versus looking at a photo, there’s lots of things you can do. And if you have if you need to be communicating to the audience, you don’t need slides, use a blank slide. It takes their focus away from looking at that back to you, you can talk as long as you want, especially if it’s a meaningful moment or something or a personal story, then they’re really paying attention to you and not whatever you have in the background, hopefully not anatomy, if it’s just play and playing, everyone’s looking at that when they should be looking at you. So having a blank slide. Ideally, Black is a great way to re engage people back to you.

David Bain
I love those little pieces of gold that you’re sharing as part of your advice there. And it’s so easy for me to keep the conversation going here and ask further follow up questions, but we can’t keep on talking all day. Fortunately, the viewer, the listener is gonna have to go and check out be the keynote.com. But just before we get on to the second section of our discussion, I just want to talk about where the skills, what we talked about actually fits into the overall business model the marketing models. So we’re talking about webinars, we’re talking about virtual summits, where in your opinion, as a piece of content, do webinars and virtual summits actually fit into the overall content marketing mix.

Oli Gardner
First of all, we have to realise that everyone’s doing it now, it was more important than ever to be better and stand out. One thing, stop calling them webinars, make it a virtual event or something because webinars an old term and it sounds really dull. And you need to a lot of it is incredibly important. And one of the things a lot of events are doing right now is they’re going to pre recorded. It allows videos to be edited. You don’t have 10 speakers all having tech problems, everything’s finished and ready. And it’s much more professional. And some people think, well, we’re start live. But what people do then is you’re seeing the recording of the event where the speaker is there and they’re in the chat, they’re engaging even more because they can have a conversation in the moment answer questions. And it’s really good. When you do that, as a speaker, as a brand you’re creating and editing ideally, this excellent piece of content that doesn’t disappear in the event silver, then you can use that in your marketing, you can break it up into little things on YouTube. And you can make it an on demand piece of content that you can use for lead gen. And I encourage every speaker, record your presentation is high quality and well lit and upgrade your mic is the first thing you should do. People will not turn off your video because it doesn’t look great. They will get out there immediately if your audio sucks. And so yeah, always think about the fact that you want to finish a piece of content you can use Don’t let your hard work and expertise disappear. The moment the events over. Absolutely.

David Bain
Let’s segue to part two of our discussion. So it’s time for all these thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE, so only share a lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tool is important for you.

Oli Gardner
This is actually not necessarily martec tool, but it can be used as one is what I think so the thing I’m most excited about right now is bubble.io. It’s a no code platform. I’ve not been this excited about software in a decade. It is there they just raised 100 million for the campaign within mentioned that they’re talking decline was like making the technical co founder obsolete, the things you can do with it, I’m building an app for the keynote. It’s absolutely incredible. And if you have a lot of marketing teams are going through kind of the product lead growth strategy right now, where you’re making little apps little functional piece of content, instead of a PDF or whatever, you’re making little tools, little marketing tools for people. And that becomes your marketing strategy. So this is not a marketing tool. But you can use it to build these apps, that typically you’d have a developer of growth hacker who has some technical skills, making this thing for you, then they leave, nobody can, nobody understands the code, and it just kind of falls apart. This can lead almost anyone create something really quickly that can be functionally useful for your audience. And it’s a much better way to do lead gen. Because it’s legitimately.

David Bain
So when we’re talking about amps, are we talking about such a mobile app that you have to download? Are we talking about something that is embedded on a web page?

Oli Gardner
Yeah, basically, you can create a website and this, but you can create a fully functional web app, you can do mobile stuff as well. Here’s an example in 20 minutes with this platform, you can and this is one things they do in the intro. So I just mentioned this, you can have an authenticated user, they can sign up, they can log in, they can log out, you can have a Google Map. With an you can pin different places, when you pin them, it goes into the database, because it has a whole database behind it, you have to do any of that. And you can have a list of all these things you pinned, you can have voting on them order by the voting, you could create that whole experience in 20 minutes. The authentication alone, of trying to build a back end system and having login logout and registration, you need a good developer for that you need a lot of time. It’s totally game changing. For anyone who wants to create something new isn’t being technical helps. But it’s absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, I

David Bain
think a great creative marketer should actually be leading the overall proposition of the business as well, when suggesting new things that the business should be doing new markets that the business should be, and I see you nodding away there. So I guess you’re in agreement with?

Oli Gardner
Yeah, definitely. And doing things like this. Getting little functional tools in front of your audience will help they’ll suddenly go like this amazing Why isn’t this your product? Or why isn’t this built into your product? It’s a great way then being features a little things that might actually go into what you what you do, because you’ll see how excited I get about how useful it is. Okay, well,

David Bain
let’s move on from something that you currently use to something that you’re going to use. So that is NEXT ON THE LIST. So what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test soon?

Oli Gardner
It’s very self referential, and I’m not trying to be selfish, but it’s the thing I’m building for be the keynote that creates this presentation experience design. The reason I say that is because I was doing I have regular check ins every couple of weeks with years, where we kind of just, you know, support each other because entrepreneurship is difficult. You know, I share my my work the latest stage of this app. And they do, I was meeting with Tony Walker, who’s the runs the content studio, amazing, amazing content guy. And we share what we’re doing. And I shared this to him and he was like, he was blown away. I had a one minute animated explainer video that I made in Keynote. It wasn’t the functional app, which I’m now building. And he was blew his mind. He’s from the film. He has a film background. And he said, this whole way that you structure this presentation, it’s the same as writing a screenplay, different terminology, but everything you’ve done is exactly that. And there’s nothing out there for screenwriters. So I’m learning that every time I have a problem that I have to work on, when I’m doing a video with a story for it. I use my tool that I’ve already started building. It’s the answer to almost everything I’m struggling with right now. And so I’m just excited to get it out to people because I has many, many use cases. So yes, self referential, but I’m excited to use the thing I’m building

David Bain
and the idea when the launch date will be like a beta kind of thing, hopefully in two months. Okay, okay. Well, I’m sure it’s exciting and appealing, certainly to all those many people that have checked out your material so far. And I like the way that you talk about things being experiential as well when I when I produce podcasts and YouTube shows for B2B brands. And whenever I talk to them about the quality of the content that they should be producing. I asked them the question Who’s your competitor, and they list off direct competitors, ie businesses that are doing the same things I’m saying, one of your key competitors is actually Netflix, because it’s taking your consumers attention and time. And they’re used to consuming that quality of content. And unless you produce that quality of content or reasonably near to it, you’re gonna switch them off by what you’re publishing.

Oli Gardner
Definitely, and we have to move in that direction. You know, these days, you write a blog post, because you want to get links, it’s people’s desire to read like that is rapidly diminishing, everything’s about video. Now, it’s very cliche. It’s like the year of mobile, you know, which took like, 10 years to actually happen. But video is kind of the only way now. Yeah, so it’s becoming a crowded space.

David Bain
But it is. It’s unbelievable. I mean, even six years ago, when marketers were told, you have to be embracing video, you have to be publishing all of your content in video form. I don’t think most people really embraced it. But nowadays, you can’t afford not to.

Oli Gardner
Yeah, we knew that unbounce Yeah, we weren’t doing it. Very frustrating for you know, people in content team, you can really like they want to do it. But we it wasn’t being made happen. They weren’t being given the what they weren’t being empowered to do that they weren’t being given the budget to buy the gear doesn’t have to be expensive. Yeah. Yeah, then that can lead your content strategy, because you can break it up into so many, so many ways.

David Bain
So let’s move on to this or that route. So this is the quick response round 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to see the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready? Yes. Tick Tock or Twitter. Facebook or LinkedIn? LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast. My wife podcast, traffic or leads. paid search or SEO. It’s all about paid ads or influencers. influencers? Yes. ads, Google ads or Facebook ads, Facebook, email marketing, chat, marketing, email, or text, or all in one platform. One to one or scale?

Both was okay, there were a few challenges a few ohms. And as what was the biggest challenge, obviously undenied over podcasts or YouTube, but there was another one as well. I think it was some traffic or leads and you said traffic? And I was quite surprised with that, actually, because I’ve come from a brand that actually just focused on lead generation. Yeah.

Oli Gardner
Yeah, I did struggle with that, I think without traffic where you’re gonna get leads from? So I mean, it’s chicken and egg. And I’d rather have the hum of the interest coming in. Versus you don’t mean I’ll get leads after that. So you know, I’m not gonna get traffic from leads. Well, I mean, you know, even leads bring him back. But my stage as an entrepreneur, I just want some traffic.

David Bain
Yeah. Okay.

Unknown Speaker
Let’s move on to the $10,000. Question.

David Bain
If RTV $10,000. And you had to spend over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you measure success in your

Oli Gardner
suite, an extra one in I buy a few hugs. It’s very lonely as a solo founder. I think I would, I would get a bubble developer someone way more experienced than me, because I’m really good at it so far. But I know it’s becoming sloppy, I’d get someone that can take what I’m doing. And make it something that can be professionally out and being used by people without breaking without losing their work. That’s my biggest fear. I’ll make something they’ll do something great with it. And they’ll lose their work because I’m not saving properly. So I’d get some more experience the thing, my idea, make it stable.

David Bain
So have you used that platform to build a lot of the content that exists at the moment and be the keynote?

Oli Gardner
No, nothing. It’s really I designed the UI for the it’s called a pulseless. As part of this presentation experience design thing, basically, where you have you break your talk down into your post nine is the heartbeat of your talk. pulses are the different parts of that. And inside those they have the narrative, they have the definition of the performance, how you will present that, what slides, you’ll have an experience moments you want to give to the audience, that’s all plotted on these. And afterwards, you can look at it and go, Oh, I want to be funny. That’s my main thing, whatever, I want you funny here, here. And here. I need to put some more in there allows you to structure that. But I’ve lost the question now. Oh, so I did a mock up in Keynote of the the UI, I was thinking this is going to cost me so much money, I have a developer build this because very strange interaction. I built it all myself. And bubble, I have this functioning web app already that does all this complicated. stuff is blue blowing my mind

David Bain
should not be concerned, though, for marketers that maybe should have their focus on other areas that they’re going to have their eyes turned by this incredible application. And they should be doing other things. Instead, they should be getting someone else to do this on their behalf.

Oli Gardner
I would say perhaps someone else on the team, maybe or I would say that it’s the reason to start doing something like this is just to see what’s possible, because it will inspire you. Because a lot of the time, a marketer will come up with an idea, this is what I want to present to my audience in order to get leads or to move them, you know, close to becoming a customer, but I can’t make it. It’s just an idea, I can’t build it, this allows you to start doing that. And if you can’t push it all the way, you can hand it off, but it will end it’ll change the way you think about what’s possible. And I think that’s really critical for marketers, because marketers have to move towards becoming technical marketers, I believe, I think that’s a skill, you have to have, know, a little bit of code down to making a web page, learn how to write and try building something, I think that is the direction marketers should be going shouldn’t hide behind the I can’t do that. I’d need a developer to do that. I’m never gonna do it. Try it yourself, it will change how you work.

David Bain
I really like the answer to know what’s possible. I think that to too many marketers, I guess, aren’t at the cutting edge of what’s possible. And therefore, I guess their overall marketing activities tend to be held back and aren’t as advanced as they could be, because they’re not at the cutting edge.

Oli Gardner
Yeah, and everybody has good ideas. But when you’re relying on the product team to build in which they either never do, or it will go right to the back of the queue, which point is become obsolete or pointless? Is it something you wanted to do in the moment, taking a bit of that control to yourself is empowering. And it can really accelerate your creativity and your skills. And also your path to you know, if you have if someone has someone who’s just doing lead gen, they got a PDF, that’s your competition doing that. If you have a functional little, little app that does a few things, let’s say it’s just the ROI, calculator, something like that, you know, whatever it is a little thing people can put in. And I’m always searching for compound interest calculator, just to try and see 20 years, sure things like that, when you know what your customers kind of have questions about. Building little things that solve those problems will make you way more useful than your competitor who just puts out a PDF,

David Bain
get saving for your pensions. Now, kids, that’s the way to do it. To do that early. That’s what compound interest is all about. So, to finish off, let’s shift the focus to someone else who deserves it. So that is a MAGICAL MARKETER who’s an up and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to what can we learn from them and where can we find them?

Oli Gardner
I would say Ross Simmons is the Simmons Foundation, marketing foundation inc.com he’s we’ve had him speaking at CTA calm, his content is ridiculously actionable. He’s very lovely. He’s impeccably dressed. As a speaker. He’ll either make you angry, because you’re not able to type or write fast enough to take notes. Or he’ll just make you happy that you spent the time and money to be there. He is. Yeah, and he has a great of content and it’s just very accessible. very open. I think that’s

David Bain
okay. Yeah, foundation inc.com is the website address there you can find Ross Simmons there but I will of course Show unshare everything you mentioned in terms of resources and the show notes over at Digital Marketing radio.com. This was Episode 260 of Digital Marketing Radio where Ollie Gardner from bt keynotes shared some wonderful tips about making a virtual presentation, walking in your customers shoes and look at things from your customers perspective. So don’t just log in to the software from a presenters perspective, use another device and log in from a non logged in perspective or a viewer perspective and see what your presentation looks like. You shared a talk by Tiffany so de Silva are all linked to that as well. And we talked about great lighting, removing the wall of text and also stop calling webinars webinars call them something incredible. Incredible. There we go. Yeah, there is the domain available. incredimail.com. So anyway, your SECRET SOFTWARE babou.io. The best way to get and build web apps without code is what they see on their websites. It’s certainly something I’ll be checking out as well. Your NEXT ON THE LIST was what you’re actually building the moment for me the keynote and your MAGICAL MARKETER was Ross Simmons from foundation Inc. Ali, what’s the best social platform for someone to follow you and say Hi. Twitter, at Twitter, Ollie Gardner. That’s definitely the best place. Super Okay. I’ll include that in the show notes as well. Thanks so much for coming on. Absolutely great to have you. I’ve been your host ever been. You can also find me producing podcasts and YouTube shows for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

Unknown Speaker
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Unknown Speaker
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