Building a Video-First PLG Strategy That Outperforms

Kevin Blanco: So I'm gonna make it a little fun. Every time that I'm gonna move a slide, I'm gonna say, woo. And if you want to say, Woo! That's fine, you can also do it. How's been the day for you? It's been great? Yeah?

Awesome. It was a test. Alright. So the session is a little bit packed, so I'm not gonna spend too much time at the beginning. But I do wanted to ask you a small questions before we get started.

And for that, I would like you to close your eyes for a second. Just close your eyes for a second. Don't sleep. I know it's it's a little bit late right now, and some of us need some coffee. But for this particular moment, what I would like you to do is just to think about a memory.

A nice memory from your life, whatever it is, from your childhood, when you went with your parents or when your first kid was born or when you got married or divorced, whatever that happy memory is. But just think about that memory, but not just think about it. Remember the environment. How was the the house like? What was the day like?

Was it rainy? Was it sunny? Just think about all of those surrounding environment. And now I would like you to open your eyes. What what did you see?

Understanding Why Video is Essential for Memory

You didn't see any words. I bet you see images, moving images of that memory. And the reality is that video is everyone's first language. Your first memory are actually videos. And the reason that's happening is because video or moving images is the way that our brain records all of those memories.

It happens that this is a biological fact, not even a psychological fact. I'm talking about a biological fact here. Because our eyes, each eye, have 16,000,000 nerves that drives information to your brain. So right now you're looking at me and you're paying attention to what I'm saying, but the fact is that the brain is recording everything around you. How was the presentation?

Who was sitting next to you? And in some days, if you remember the presentation that I gave, you will most likely remember older things that you were not deliberately putting attention to because the brain is picking up everything with your eyes. So that's the reason why video, it's the most used medium nowadays. I'm talking about 90% of the video traffic that's happening right now in your phones. It's freaking video.

90%. And if we think about the measure, the amount of data that's being transmitted this year in terms of video, it's an amount that I cannot even pronounce in terms of zeros. 166 zettabytes or zettabytes with my Latin American pronunciation. Like think about it, if we think about one exabyte, which is before zettabyte, one exabyte is a 100,000,004 ks movies. So just think about what a zettabyte is.

And 165 of zettabytes is the amount of data being transmitted on the Internet with video. So what you're probably saying, what is the most used I guess I should be adopting it, and a lot of companies are doing it. But why is everyone failing with video? Why is not everyone just converting a lot of users with video if they try it out? I'm curious.

How many of you have tried video in your company? So you're literally? Have you there? Kind of. So there's a reason why video is not working for everybody.

Fix Your Product Before Video Strategy

There you go. There's a hard truth about why video, whoo, is not working for everybody. And the reality is no video whatsoever, strategy will save your broken product. Let me say that again. No freaking video will save your broken product.

That's the reality. I've seen marketing teams spend 100 ks easily on some video strategy that is going to drive some KPIs and it's going to get people into the funnel and all of those marketing jargon we use every day. It doesn't work. It's because probably the adoption from video to trial is broken. It's taking people ten to fifteen minutes to be able to set up on your product.

So before you do any type of video strategy, go fix your broken product first. Okay? Because some people have said to me, oh, Kevin has been speaking about video for a long time in the DevRel chat space, the Slack that we have. Kevin has been talking about video for a long time. And it's a scam because it doesn't work.

Nice. Because your product is broken. That's what a scam is. So I'm just gonna talk about the three sins of DevRel video, which I've been doing for a long time and I don't want you to do it. The pre, during, after stages of video production that have helped me is like a framework that I'm gonna share with you.

The five laws of DevRel for video, and then some homework and the playbook. I spent some time to write a long handbook and a long list of recommendations, and I'm gonna go through it. But at the end, you will be able to scan a QR code and download the playbook. You won't be needing to enter your email. This is not a lead demand generation thing, So that's that's fine.

So who who is this freak with sunglasses? That's probably the thing you're asking. There is a reason why I wear sunglasses all the time, but I will tell you that at the end. I've been working in tech for over the last fifteen years. First, just working as a developer, dev operations guy, then SRA, then technical director, then CTO for some of these companies that you see on the top.

And then I moved to more dev role. As of right now, I'm working full time for AppSmith, but also done video strategies for companies such as Combax, Angrock, Vimeo, Build for Devs, and a long list. I'm just not there. I also happen to be a private pilot, and I live in Costa Rica. So if any of you wanna go to Costa Rica sometime and wanna fly over there, just let me know.

I'll be more than happy to fly you around just to see an active volcano, the beaches, and all that stuff. Whoo. Whoo. There you go. Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.

Three Sins to Avoid in Video Production

This is the three scenes of videos that it's a great starter for me because it's a mechanism to talk about the things that I do, that I have done, that you shouldn't be doing. The first one is pressing record without knowing your exact pain for your exact persona that you're gonna be remediating after they watch the video. So the the key thing here is for me, if your video is not gonna be transformative, you shouldn't make a video at all. If after somebody watches your video or your piece of content and they're not different afterwards, then you probably don't need video at all. The second thing is creating content without defining the funnel stage you're targeting.

We have been all talking about stages so I guess you know what the funnel is. I'm not going to spend time on that. But it's important to understand which funnels you're targeting because depending on the funnel stage, that's how success is going to look like different between each of the different stages. It's not the same a video for awareness or a video for growth. They're completely different because they have different goals.

So the way you're going to record them, the way you're going to present them to your team, and the way you're going to even distribute that video, it's going be completely different depending on this stage. And then you want to move that person into the next stage in the funnel. So that's why understanding this particular SIN is extremely important. And we have been talking about measurement. Measure, measure, measure.

That's extremely important. You can't improve. You can't improve, but you are not measuring. So these are the three sins. Make sure that you're not committing these sins.

Effective Pre-Production Strategies for Video

Alright. So what is the the stages for me when I'm trying to record a video? 60% of the time, I spend here. Pre production is key. If you don't spend that time, your video won't probably convert as you want.

So the questions that you might want to ask is, what's the persona? Like, who am I targeting to these particular videos? Who am I exactly serving? What is the pain point being addressed? What keeps them awake and mind saying, this?

You have to be able to answer that question. What is the foundation I'm targeting? What are the success metrics that I'm trying to come up with? And obviously, a distribution plan. If you can't answer these questions, you probably don't need a video at all.

That's it. Now, let's talk about the production phase. Now that I understand who am I targeting, where are they, are they feeling, what are the problems they're trying to solve, then I'm going to start thinking about the structure that I'm going to deliver in the video. This structure works for any type of video, whether if it is an awareness video that is going to be maybe top of the funnel or a growth video or a video for advocacy. It's a framework that has been proven over more than 700 videos that I've produced, and it's giving me results.

Using the Limbic Logic Action Framework

So the way I call it is the limbic logic action framework because it's a three stages structure. It's very simple. The first one is the limbic opening. The second one is the tell show tell structure. And the third is the call to action.

First one, the limbic opening. So one of the best books that I have read in my life coming from one of the best TED talk sessions that I have seen is Start with Why from Simon Sinek. I don't know if you have seen that one. So what Simon Sinek talked about is why how the brain works. And again, going back to the biological fact, again, not psychological fact, the biological fact is that the way that our brain processes the why is very different from how it process the how and the what.

And let me tell you that a lot of you, when you're talking about your product, are just focusing on the what and the how. I have a great product. It can connect to multiple APIs. It can save some time from you, and you can ship faster. That's most how most of you communicate.

That doesn't drive conversion because the limbic part of the brain that drives behavior, it's not the same as the part of the brain that manages facts. So it's very easy to come up with a feature. I would like somebody to hear from any of the company that you work with. Can you tell me a feature from any of the companies you work with? Whatever it is, just a feature.

Navigation. Okay. Now tell me that same feature but as an outcome. What is an outcome people can have with your navigation? Finding directions.

Don't ever say navigation again. Say finding directions. That is the outcome of it. Okay, so the limbic part of the brain is pretty much the one handling emotions and it's normally the one that drives behavior for adoption. So limbic opening can be a lot of things, a number, a fact, or what I did at the beginning of this presentation.

When I connect your most biggest emotional remembering that you can have to the video presentation. I connect that, which is a very raw part of your memory, to, in this particular case, video. But there are multiple ways to have limbic openings. So in the playbook that I'm sharing at the end with the QR that you're going to be scanning, you'll be able to see a huge list of different limbic openings that you can use in your video to try to connect your why to your audience. Remember, start with why.

People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Now the tell teller structure, now you're not gonna spend too much time. It's just the first minute, first four seconds on the leaving opening. It's impactful.

It's a hook. You're not gonna spend too much time on it. The tell show tell structure is just a mechanism to deliver what you're trying to expose in a very simple and effective way. Thank you to TikTok. Our brains are burned.

Thank you to Instagram. Our mechanism for managing long videos, it's burned. So you have to try to deliver your message and the transformative power of your video in a shorter format. So the tell show tell structure is basically I tell you what I'm going to show you. I spend no more than two minutes showcasing that, and then I reinforce the message, and this is probably really important, I reinforce the message that you're now different of how you were two minutes ago.

So it's key because I've seen a lot of videos from a lot of your companies, and you spend six minutes going over some list of features, and that's boring. Nobody's going to transform that. If you just divide that into small chunks that people can feel progress to once they're connected to your why and your limbic opening and why this is important for them at the beginning, it's going to be much easier for them to digest and there is most likely a chance for them to stay. Once we implemented this structure, we saw longer engagement in our videos. People stayed longer.

Normally, people drop around thirty seconds, sixty seconds on videos. And if you have a YouTube channel, you're capable of seeing that. So start implementing this structure. It's very simple. There's a lot of content on the Internet about the Teleshotel structure, and it's also in the dialectable playbook that we'll have at the end.

Importance of Clear Call to Action in Videos

And then a clear call to action. Now that you tell them why this is key for them, you give them a brief explanation very direct on how their life's gonna be different after the video, you need to tell them what exactly you need them to do right after they watch the video. It has to be a clear, trackable, trackable action, and it has to be completely removed from all the friction. So again, what I just told you, feature matters, yeah, but outcomes drive adoption. Don't you ever talk more about your features.

Stop freaking doing that. Stop talking about benefits and start talking about benefits, sorry, and outcomes. Alright. So you made a video. You started with why.

You had your structure. You did it great. Now you're going be famous? People are going to start adopting your product immediately to just upload it to YouTube and you have organic results right away? Of course not.

Post-Production Strategies for Video Success

We're not influencers. We work in the b to b, b to d market. We're not influencers. People aren't going to drive adoption immediately after you upload your video to YouTube. So the post production section, it's as important as the preproduction and as the production phase of your video.

First, you have to understand what are the strategic distribution channels, not only where but when. Let me tell you, when I changed that portion, I realized how important is the time and the day that you share your content. There are multiple ways you can use Cloud to ask this and make research. What are the best times to deploy well, not deploy, to publish a video on different channels? It's not the same as LinkedIn, as Twitter, as YouTube, as YouTube Shorts because people consume this medium in different in different moments of the day.

Maybe when they wake up, they go to the bathroom and they're just scrolling as they're sitting taking a dump. They're just watching LinkedIn or YouTube chores or Instagram. Or maybe when they are investigating something about their work, they're going to be using older mediums. Again, when I started to analyze in my preproduction stage where the content is going and impacted my postproduction phase, obviously, I saw a huge conversion rate in terms of the adoption of my videos. Like I said, the timing and strategy, the internal product coordination, this is key, obviously, because if you're maybe doing a product launch or a feature launch sorry, an outcome launch, it's important that you align with your marketing team, with your product team, with your sales team or whatever the team you have, defining the metrics that actually matter.

I'm not saying subscribers or views. If your company is tracking views and subscribers as a measurement for success, you're likely gonna fail. You have to track exactly trial to sorry, video to trial, view from trial, CTR to trial, or even improvement on your support tickets. Let me tell you a fun story about this at AppSmith, which is I'm currently working at. We were getting a lot of questions and a lot of messages in our Discord and our support emails about the OAuth two authentication layer.

So AppSmit supports OAuth two authentication. It works pretty well. But the the documentation was not the best in terms of implementing different use cases because there are multiple ways to implement OAuth two point o and different tools implemented in a different way. Some send the thing on the body, others on the header. So there are multiple ways to implement OAuth two point o depending on the provider you're using, long story short.

So the support team, we're getting a lot of questions around that. So we said that's gonna be the driving force for our video. So we created a set of videos around OAuth two integration with multiple tools. And it turns out we saw a supported client tickets on OAuth two topics. So again, it's not only about conversion.

If you're trying to grow and adopt more users, it's most likely that you want to understand the pain problems that your internal customer success team is having. At the end, like I always said, this is a video I posted two days ago on my LinkedIn. DevRel is sales. DevRel is customer success. DevRel is marketing, and DevRel is product, whether we like it or not.

We're gonna be touching points on every stage with different teams, and it's important that you're capable of talking the language of each of these teams within your team within your company. Whoo. Am I boring you? Awesome. So I have a full example, but I'm gonna go through it because I only have seven minutes left and I wanna go to the five laws of the real video.

But very quickly, it's just a template. We're answering the template that I'm sharing with you that you will be able to download afterwards. But, again, it's a personal definition who am I targeting. General data will give you general results. It's keen that you define a very specific persona.

In this particular case, I'm saying it's just an example, a fake example. It's not real for any product here. A senior who am I targeting for this particular video? Senior React developers at series a to c startups who have from three to seven years of experience maybe using multi region Postgres SQL databases in the Europe regions running on Vercel Ordentify. That's as specific as it can be.

So the good thing about being specific is that you immediately understand who is this video not for. And it's gonna be very easy for you to put a name on this video, and it's gonna be very easy for the people who wanna watch the title of this video to understand that video is for me, but it's not for me because I'm not running multi region databases on Postgres SQL and my front end is not React and I'm not in the Europe regions and I'm not looking for performance optimizations. That video is not for me. So that's great. The more details you are on the user person and the problem you're trying to solve, the better results you're going to have.

It's most likely that you will not get so many views, but that's great again because views is not a measurement data that you can use for valuable results. It's the outcome of that. So again, company size, tech stack, the pain point trying to address. The follow-up stage consideration, what is the current behavior, the information that they're looking for, the decision driving criteria. Again, the framework will be in the QR code.

You will be able to answer that and will give you more information about your preproduction strategy. The success metrics and the distribution planning, again, not only what are going to be the primary channels when I'm going to publish this, but also what times, in which particular LinkedIn groups, which particular influence I'm gonna be touching points on, and then secondary amplification. For example, two weeks after, three weeks after, how are you gonna continue to use this content to maybe find a partnership or a joint collaboration with Vercel and Nedlify because this touches their customers. So it's a great mechanism to talk to the DevRel team and maybe have a joint collaboration and talk about improvements for React applications running on Vercel or Netlify in the Europe regions for this fake case that we have here. Then the production stage is just an example of what the Limbic opening will look like.

It has facts. It has figures. It has numbers. They can put it down to money, which is always great when you're talking about, in this case, it's optimization. So I'm gonna be putting into numbers.

In this particular case, I'm using a limbic opening called fax. Fax are always great. You're putting into numbers and people can relate to that if they are the user persona for that video. Then the tell show tell structure and the clear call to action. And then the post production.

Again, just going back to what I said at the beginning in the production stage, I execute upon that. And obviously, I have metrics to review that. So the five laws of video for PLG is pretty much the same that I've been talking to you. First, the law of specificity. The more specific your content is to a more specific use case, to a more specific user persona, the better results we'll have.

If you make a general video, how to run React connected to Postgres, you will get general results. Just a bunch of views, very top of the funnel, but no conversion rates because they are not the persona the user persona for your product. There's just a bunch of people looking for how to videos in YouTube. It's most likely that you won't convert from that. The law of the limbic priority, again, start with why, the limbic part of the brain, the decision making part of the brain.

Always tap into that when you're starting even a conversation. You don't have to only use that for only choose videos. It's great for demos. It's great for having a conversation here. Start with why.

What keeps people awake at night? What is driving their force to do what they're doing? The law of the funnel enlightenment, again, if you understand your funnel, you can understand what success looks like. I was just talking with Joseph. He is my boss, Raps Smith, and he's focusing a lot on growth videos.

That means he jumps on the IDE and start showcasing people how to have benefits and outcomes using our tool. It's for existing customers. It's not for awareness. I focus more on awareness videos. So the fact that Joseph have a 100 views, but people stay on his videos for about 80% of the video, it makes sense because that means that existing users are seeing the use cases that he's showcasing very valuable.

But if I have a WordPress video where I have 10,000, 20,000 views, but none of them convert, I could say that's a fail. That's a fail. Because, again, it's not the amount of views. It's a funnel alignment. For me, a top of the funnel video might be that they sign up for AppSmith.

But not only sign up, they connect the database because for me it's really important that they connect the database so they can see the power of the local platform. So that's how we're gonna be measuring that. They come from the video, they sign up, and they connect the database. That's how Sussex looks like. I'm not just gonna say, oh, had a thousand views.

I'm great. Continue to pay my salary. No. No. I have to, again, be very specific, be able to connect to the why of these developers, and understand the funnel stage they're at so I can move them to the next stage.

If they're capable of going into the awareness stage, try AppSmith and connect their database, we know because we have data on that that they're most likely going to activate and they're going to convert it to a full paid user. It's only when they connect their database when they see the true power of our product in this particular case. So you have to go and understand your moment, your happy path, because if that happy path is not clear, and again going back to the beginning of the presentation when I said if your product is broken, then probably your video won't do any effect. Once you understand that that path is very easy to achieve for your users, they now go and make video to build awareness on that. Like I said, number three, the law of the outcome obsession.

Don't talk about features after today. Is there one thing you can take from my presentation? Do not talk about features anymore. Benefits and outcomes. Benefits and outcomes.

Start with why, talk about benefits and their outcomes. And lastly, search in TX, obviously. There you go. And the last one is, again, trackable intent. It's important that you understand what you're tracking, being able to come up with the data three months after you publish your video and say, yes, that was a success or no.

Homework for Improving Video Effectiveness

And if you have the data, you will be able to understand why was that a success. Alright. Woo. Immediate action items. I have homework for you.

If you work at a company that produces video or any type of visual content, in this particular case as moving images, which is videos, Even though you're in charge or not of producing these videos, want you to do three things. Go and audit your last five videos or whatever amount of videos you have. It doesn't matter if it is an internal archive or in YouTube or whatever tool you use for video, go and audit your last five videos and connect it to everything I just explained. It's tapping to the limbic part of the brain. Does it have a clear path with a structure that people can see progress and feel they're making a change after two or three minutes of watching your videos?

Is it clear the call to action for them? Is it clear for them what they have to do right after they see the transformative power of what you explained in the tell show tell structure? Are you talking about benefits or outcomes? So go and make that small audit. Just bring a Notion page or a Notion page, whatever, and say if you're doing that or not.

Second, create your own PLG video metrics based upon the QR code I'm gonna share, which has the PLG video metric. You just fill in and you'll be able to answer all the questions that will tell you exactly how to move the needle forward and establish success metrics for your team. That's your homework. Alright. So that's what I promised.

The first one is the PLG video framework that you can download, you can start implementing your company right away, it has everything that I just talked in an extended format. And also you can connect with me. That's gonna take you to my LinkedIn profile and also I run a something that I call the DevRel weekly newsletter where I talk more about this and more video tips. Like, I didn't wanted this to be an actual video, like editing or anything like that because there's a lot of people talking about how to produce good quality videos. I've been talking about that in my YouTube channel as well.

There's I have multiple how to videos on how to create better videos using DaVinci Resolve or whatever tool. That's that's not what I wanted to talk here. I wanted to tell a framework and a structure that works for any type of product led growth organization. I have two minutes, and I wanted you to see a video that completely breaks all the rules that I set. How cool is that?

And it actually was a success video. So this one is a fun video that I recorded in one hour using my iPhone, and it it was a huge impact because it was to announce one of our feature launches or benefit launches. Sorry. One of our quarter launch events, and this one drove five times more sign ups than any of the existing events that we have ever done at AppSpeed over the last five years. And let me see if I can play it.

Do we have sound? Babe. Yes, babe? You're come and hear from us, babe. Oh, cool.

It's probably more swag. Do not open before January 13, launch week plan. It's what it is. Oh, this is great. This is awesome.

Yes. That's it. So thank you. So what I wanna close-up is have fun. Go have fun with videos.

Use the structure that I told you. Have fun, and you'll see that you will do better the next time you push a video to YouTube or whatever medium format. Take care. Thank you very much, Kevin.