Mia Fileman 0:05
This is Got Marketing? – a fud-free, fluff-free, no-nonsense podcast for marketers looking to work smarter.
I’m your host, Mia Fileman – a marketing strategist with over two decades of experience, and an entrepreneur.
I’m tired of marketers telling you what you want to hear. Instead, I tell you what you need to hear. During the show, I chat with creatives and strategists about all the aspects of marketing, but especially marketing campaigns. Unpacking and dissecting marketing campaigns is what I do for fun.
Got Marketing? is brought to you by Campaign Del Mar – the marketing education platform where marketers and entrepreneurs go to upskill.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Hello! Welcome back to the Got Marketing? Podcast!
If content is king, then video marketing is the master of the universe. With the rise of platforms like TikTok and even Instagram prioritising video marketing in the form of Reels, I thought that this would make a great episode topic today, so I reached out to a small business owner who absolutely nails their video marketing and invited them onto the show.
Joining me today is Jonathan Steedman who is the principal dietitian and head honcho at Bite Me Nutrition. He is an accredited practicing dietitian and a nutritionist passionate about simple sensitive nutrition and, well, vegetables.
Welcome, Jon-o!
Jonathan Steedman 1:45
Thank you for having me! I know it’s a stereotype – a dietitian obsessed with veggies – but you can’t buck the trend.
Mia Fileman 1:52
Definitely not.
I’d love to hear your brand story. I don’t just want the juicy bits. I want all of it. Tell me how you went from Guyetitian to Bite Me Nutrition.
Jonathan Steedman 2:09
The Guyetitian was thrown together in four weeks right at the beginning of the pandemic – May 2020. The branding was done by my wife on Canva. The photos were taken in my kitchen. It was all very quick, juggling lockdown. “Throw it together. Get something together, so it can get working.”
The name Guyetitian came from – I can’t even remember where it came from – but I started operating as that for maybe a little over 12 months. The name – obviously, it’s a play on me being a guy and a dietitian, but the name had a few issues.
Firstly, it’s quite singular. When looking to grow a team, it didn’t really sit right with me. Two, I had a surprising amount of people think I only worked with guys. That was not ideal given that I would say actually 90 percent of my clientele so happens to be female.
Actually, it was great for SEO in one way, but in the other way, everyone misspelled it because dietitian in Australia is spelled with two Ts whereas pretty much everywhere else it’s “t-i-c” and so there were lots of issues with emails bouncing back and all of that. I knew it was time for a change.
Bite Me Nutrition is actually a brand name I’ve had floating around since I graduated but never really did anything with it. The stars aligned to represent a little bit more of what I wanted to do in terms of nutrition itself and the business itself. I like that it’s a bit tongue in cheek which I think plays into my branding a little bit and the way I want to do things and could not be happier with the outcome.
Mia Fileman 3:52
Oh, my gosh. So true!
So many interesting points that you made there. First of all, how good is Canva? Gamechanger for small businesses.
Jonathan Steedman 4:00
Amazing, yes.
Mia Fileman 4:03
Also, humans are simple creatures. If you put Guyetitian in the name, then that’s what they’re going to assume it’s for. True story.
I did quite a bit of work for Black Swan Dips in my career. We had a yogurt. The marketing manager at the time decided that we would call it Breakfast Yogurt. Everyone was like, “You’re crazy! Why are you calling it Breakfast Yogurt? That’s so silly.” You would be so surprised at the amount of people who bought it to eat it for breakfast. When we did market research with them, we were like, “Why do you love this yogurt?” They were like, “Well, I have it for breakfast,” because it had it on the label that it’s for breakfast.
Marketing is not hard. We’re not saving lives here. It’s really simple.
Jonathan Steedman 4:49
Hammer, nail, right? Yes, that’s amazing.
Mia Fileman 4:55
So true.
I came across you because someone sent me your videos. They are hands-down some of the best things on the internet. And so, I really wanted to have you on the show.
I’m so curious about your creative and production process. Can we dive into that?
Jonathan Steedman 5:13
Yes, absolutely.
Firstly, a lot of the branding work and a lot of the video work has two parts. I’m very, very lucky that my wife has zero graphic design background but has an amazing eye for that stuff. She definitely played into the branding component. I was looking for black, white, and a strong contrasting colour – picking between four colours. You probably see where this is going if anyone’s seen the videos.
I can’t remember – whether it was my wife or myself or Ben who is responsible for the videos from Goliath Productions – who came up with the idea. “Why not just use all of them?”
My industry definitely suffers from an overkill of green, beige, brown – earthy natural colours which works really well for some brands but wasn’t really the path I wanted to go down. The brief was aggressively colourful.
Mostly, it was all filmed in one day in my house. We had the massive, coloured backdrops. There was no editing going on. I am wearing coloured shirts that I had to hunt on the internet to match the coloured backdrops that we had to hunt to match the branding colours. It was putting a bunch of videos together.
I already had funny photos with food from the Guyetitian. Again, posing with food is pretty common in my industry, but it is often people laughing at salads. I wanted to take it a little step further.
I wrote most of the scripts, then it was myself and Ben bouncing ideas back and forth, and then – as I often do – asking my wife, “Hey! Is this funny? Is this a good idea or not?” and she added in. It was very much a melting pot of all our ideas.
Lots of work. Not a huge amount of design. A lot of it just coming together with a bit of luck and a bit of fluke but unbelievably happy with the outcome.
Mia Fileman 7:13
So good.
What’s really interesting is that you have curated creativity within your business whereas there seems to be this real tendency to outsource creativity, but you brought Ben – who I know understand is one of your good friends – and your wife who I dare say you get along with.
Jonathan Steedman 7:32
We’re close, yes.
Mia Fileman 7:35
It was that true collaboration that created such a wonderful result whereas the way that that traditional agency-client relationship works is like there’s an invisible wall there. They’re like (7:50 unclear) sends the brief over, then they respond. You guys just smashed those walls and were like, “Can we all just get in a room and figure this shit out and create something really great?” and it comes across.
Jonathan Steedman 8:07
Yes. Like I said, I was very lucky to have those people in my life with those amazing skills. That’s why I think it felt – I wouldn’t say “easy” – natural in terms of nothing felt forced. All of the ideas felt very true and authentic. All of those words which I know can be really difficult to achieve but, like I said, just got lucky.
Mia Fileman 8:33
Amazing.
They’re fantastic videos, and they’ve performed really well on social media, but what are some of the results from the videos?
Jonathan Steedman 8:45
Probably a week doesn’t go by where I don’t get a compliment from an existing client or someone on social media or someone who has stumbled on the website. Lots of really good feedback from that perspective. I think it helps set the brand apart because it looks so different.
I also filmed a lot of videos on the day that aren’t public. That sounds dodgy! Like, client journey videos – when someone books, they get a welcome video from me with the same production design; they will get a video after their first consult; they will get a video – if there’s been a few months where we haven’t caught up – to check in. I think those have also helped strengthen existing client relationships.
Again, I do a lot of my work remotely. If you have a practice or you have a shop where you have got a space, you can make that really welcoming and warm, but it’s hard to do that in an online business, so having those videos I think has added that extra level of design and personal touch that has helped strengthen those client relationships even though they are remote. That aspect of the videos has been really helpful as well.
Mia Fileman 9:56
My gosh. I love that so much. In marketing speak, we call that the customer experience. It’s so great to meet a small business owner who understands that and prioritises that really exemplary customer experience and delivers that. Well done, mate!
Jonathan Steedman 10:16
Thank you!
Mia Fileman 10:19
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How have the videos performed in terms of growing your audience on social media? Because that is obviously a key issue for a lot of the listeners. They want to build their audience.
Jonathan Steedman 11:11
Yes, I wouldn’t say hugely, if I’m perfectly honest.
I guess the videos were part of a bigger rebrand, so having those colours and then having stills from those videos which I’ve been able to use to create static posts and things, I think. I don’t feel arrogant saying this because I feel like I had so little to do with the design, so I’m happy to say, “Damn, it’s good!” I feel like, if you come onto my Instagram page, it stands out. It jumps out because of the colours and the different design elements.
Maybe not specifically the videos themselves, but I think the content overall has definitely helped grow with reach and following. Followers don’t translate into sales necessarily which is probably something we can talk about as well, but in terms of growth, the whole rebrand in general has been beneficial. I wouldn’t say that the videos themselves have been relevant for that growth. They’re probably the next stage – someone finds the brand, goes on to the website, and then gets to see those videos and gets a better understanding of what we’re about.
Mia Fileman 12:14
What a surprise. One thing doesn’t change the world. It’s the combination of lots of things.
Jonathan Steedman 12:23
Who’d have thunk it?
Mia Fileman 12:24
Yes, it’s really such a shock coming from an integrated marketer. Yes, I think that is a seriously good message. There’s no silver bullet in nutrition or in marketing.
It’s that combination and that integration of that seamless brand experience. On your website, you’ve got the creative theme consistently running through the website, the social channels, the actual onboarding client experience, the offboarding client experience, so that it creates that beautiful consistency of messaging. I love it. It’s so good!
Jonathan Steedman 13:02
I don’t have a marketing background. I guess it’s probably a dietitian thing. We want to know how people tick. We want to understand people and have the ability to get inside their minds. It sounds a bit scary. We want to learn about the person and things.
I think that view of marketing is something I’ve always been interested in. Looking at other brands outside of my industry and the way that they do it has always been really helpful because, in my industry – no offense to other dietitians – I think there is a bit of a gap in our market.
We’re not very fantastic at branding, which is because I think, a lot of the time, we feel like it waters down our strengths as a practitioner because we’re focused on getting the best clinical outcomes for our clients – as we should be – but I don’t think one blocks the other. I think there’s space for both, and there should be space for both.
Mia Fileman 13:59
Absolutely.
We are definitely going to talk about the fact that you like to throw shade, and I love to throw shade at other marketers in my industry. We will definitely be getting to that. Don’t go anywhere because that’s the chat, for sure.
I love that you don’t have a marketing background. You are the poster child of small business owners who can absolutely learn to do this shit for themselves and build a very successful business.
This is why I was so interested to talk with you because 95 percent of my audience are females as well and there is this misconception that “oh, well, I’m not a professional marketer; I don’t have a marketing background, so I can’t possibly do all of this!” which is just not true. Absolutely not true.
Jonathan Steedman 14:53
Yes. Well, like anything, you have to suck at something at first. The more you do it, the better you get at it.
I should dig up the initial branding for Bite Me Nutrition from five years ago. It was interesting. My first few years on Instagram were horrible.
It’s a skill, right? Like any skill, you’re going to suck at it, and there’ll be parts of the skill that you pick up quicker than others and will come a bit more naturally to you, and there will be other parts that are a hard grind, and you’re never going to be great at them, but that’s why you’ve got to work.
Mia Fileman 15:36
I also think that – love it or hate it or whatever – it is a business necessity. Put on your big girl panties and just get it done because it is not going anywhere.
Honestly, if you are somebody that’s like, “I just hate the marketing. I don’t want to do the marketing. Not interested in the marketing,” and you don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to outsource it, then I really question whether you should be in business because it is an absolute necessary evil.
As you said, just suck it and see and just get it done. Even for me, as a marketer, there are so many things that I’ve had to learn how to do myself over the last three years of running my start-up. As a marketer, I’m used to having minions that write the copy for me and that do the social media posting for me and that go and design these beautiful designs – not in Canva.
As a bootstrap start-up founder, lo and behold, I can’t afford to pay anyone to do any of those things – not in the first five years. And so, I have had to learn all of those things myself. Yes, the first couple of videos I made were terrible – so, so bad! – but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?
Jonathan Steedman 16:58
It’s a bit of a rite of passage. Everyone’s got their terrible reel or their terrible video or their terrible copy or lots of that stuff.
If you think about all of the different aspects of running a business or being in business, there are probably components of it that you enjoy. Maybe you really enjoy the financial dashboarding side of things and going through your numbers, but you hate marketing.
Well, for every one of you, there’s going to be someone who’s the opposite who loves marketing but hates the financial thing, but you can’t just not do your numbers because you don’t like doing it. There are parts of your job that will be a job. Maybe for you, marketing is the work component, but tough.
Mia Fileman 17:41
Do you know what I think the problem is? The romanticisation – that’s a word! The romanticisation of entrepreneurship. It’s like, “Find a job you love and never work a day in your life!” Who the fuck said that? How is that true?
Jonathan Steedman 18:01
Yes, you can set your own hours – as long as those hours are 6:00 AM until 2:00 AM.
I definitely think there’s a huge push out there with all of the laptop “work by the beach, work by the pool” sorts of things. No one is doing that. No one is really doing that, so stop trying to get to that place.
Mia Fileman 18:25
Maybe they are doing it, but it certainly doesn’t happen in the first three years. It won’t happen in the first five years. It is only after you have put in all the blood, sweat, and tears that you and I are putting in that you can start to reap some of those rewards.
But then, I wouldn’t be lounging too long on the beach because, if you are not moving forward, then you are going backwards in business. And so, I really question that narrative of “work ten hours a week and create a wildly successful business.” That’s in a very, very small percentage of cases.
Jonathan Steedman 19:02
Yes, I have not stumbled upon how to do that, but I’ll keep you posted.
Mia Fileman 19:07
Please do, absolutely. And then, you can put it into a $49.00 plug-and-play template that you can sell to people.
Jonathan Steedman 19:18
It’s usually $50.99 but just for this week it’s $49.00. Sure!
Mia Fileman 19:28
You said this earlier that followers do not equal sales. Many of your videos have gone – what we like to call – viral. Does virality equal sales?
Jonathan Steedman 19:45
No, definitely not.
Virality probably does equal followers to a certain extent. Yes, the biggest leaps in my following have been because a post or a video has been reposted either by lots of people or by certain big accounts and I definitely get a ton of followers from that.
But I think something that’s often overlooked is the quality of those followers and that’s almost a separate content strategy in and of itself. I have lots of content that I make that I know won’t get tons of likes, I know certainly won’t go viral, but it really strengthens the relationship with myself and the followers and hopefully positions me as that trusted voice for nutrition.
You should never try and make a viral video, but obviously there’s certain types of content where, if I’m playing a dumb song on my toy piano, I know that’s far more likely to go viral than me holding up a frozen meal. But, at the same time, that frozen meal post is going to have a lot of good nutrition information and some actionable points.
Hopefully the people reading that are going to go, “This guy actually is really helpful, and he knows his stuff.” Even though that might get a quarter or infinitely less of the likes and the reach of the silly song parody, the song parody isn’t what’s going to be converting followers into clients.
Mia Fileman 21:12
I love that.
The lesson there is not to be evaluating your social media content by how much reach and how many followers it generates but other more important metrics like how many people save that, how many people tap on your profile, what are your website clicks, or what are your sales and what are your conversions because I completely agree there are some posts that I share on Instagram that are purely promotional – where I’m saying, “Hey! Purchase this product!” While they don’t perform well at all from a reach or impression, they actually end up with dollars in the bank account, but people are afraid to do that because they are measuring all of their Instagram content by vanity metrics.
Jonathan Steedman 22:02
Yes, and it’s hard to not look at that stuff. I try my very best to not look at reach and likes. There are times where going through those metrics can be valuable to get a sense of what style of content is landing, but – like you said – you can’t completely go all-in on post types that are getting you the most likes because the posts that sell are the ones that are going to pay your electricity and keep a roof over your head and allow you to invest in staff or infrastructure or software that’s going to allow your business to grow which is great for you as a business owner, but it’s also really good for your clients because, obviously, the more money I can invest into my business, the better service I can provide my clients. Me playing a song parody on a toy piano probably isn’t helping too much in that scenario.
Mia Fileman 22:54
Yes, I think the question that you come back to is “Do I want to be popular? Or do I want to get paid?” I really feel that what I tell my customers is that every piece of content needs to lead somewhere. It needs to be fit for purpose.
Some of your content needs to be about reach and engagement and building your audience, but some of your content needs to lead to website traffic so that you can capture them onto a known platform. Some of your website content needs to be high value so that you can establish yourself as a credible thought leader or authority in your space. Some of your content should be funny and humorous so that you can showcase your brand personality. But all of it needs to lead somewhere. It absolutely needs to be purposeful.
Jonathan Steedman 23:47
Yes, I think if you’ve got all those structures in place, then you need to use them, right?
Mia Fileman 23:56
Totally.
Good news! There’s more to this chat.
Play the next episode to hear the rest of the conversation.
