My viral latte art video, and my plan for finally getting on board with video Marketing

By dan - On

After years of content, I’ve finally decided to start with video. In this post I’ll detail the plan for April 2024, and at the end of the month I’ll report back with the results.

Background

In 2015 I wrote ‘Content Machine‘, a book about Content Marketing, which focused around the businesses I’d been able to build using my preferred form of content which was writing. I knew video would be big, but I wasn’t good at it. From the book:

“I tried out video, but I found I couldn’t really do it at a high standard. I also found it stressful and hard to come up with ideas. Plus it got very little traction. I know it works well for some other people, but I don’t like it, so I don’t do it.”

I’ve watched video explode since then to the point where there’s barely any point in doing any other kind of content these days. But I haven’t changed how I’ve felt about it. It’s hard, doesn’t feel natural, I can’t do it well and I don’t like it, so I don’t do it.

Today that changed.

Today we wrapped up a 10-video shoot for my new Coffee business East Coast Roast, and over the next few weeks I’m finally delving into video marketing. And the funny thing is, that even before we publish any of the videos, I’m currently going somewhat viral for another video I made quickly and on the cheap myself. More on that video at the end, for now let’s talk about video marketing.

If you are interested in following along as I run and grow the East Coast Roast coffee business, here are some post I’ve written about it so far:

Baseline

When I took over the business it had around 1,000 Instagram followers. I have shared it quite a bit and we’ve grown that, but I think we can do a lot better. Here’s where things stand at the time of writing, and we’ll be trying to increase this by 10% this month.

  • Instagram – 1,468
  • Facebook – 897
  • Twitter – 0 (no account yet)
  • LinkedIn – 51 (I set this page up, I reckon we can do OK on LinkedIn).
  • TikTok – 14 (just set the account up)
  • MailChimp – 414
  • TOTAL – 2,844

Video ideas

I have a document where I write down upcoming video ideas. Once I committed to doing video, the ideas flowed pretty freely. I have a note on my phone and a Google Doc where I move the ideas to once I think they are OK. The plan is to come up with 10 per month. Over the next month or so I added to the list and had around 20 video ideas sitting there ready to go (more on this later).

Getting help

Because I’ve always struggled with video, I wanted to get some help. I brought in my friend Sarah from Eleven Lights Media to do a one day content shoot with us and I asked the team to join in the fun. We booked it in and I showed her through some of the ideas I had.

She set up a Clickup page and she added a few ideas in for herself. Before the shoot we’d refined the list to 10 ideas that we both thought were worth having a crack at. The shoot happened today, we got through 9 videos and I’ll do another one myself once the month is over to wrap up the results. It was super fun and I’m feeling pretty good about what was achieved in one day.

Here are the ideas we got done and a prediction from me on how well I think they will go (I will be wrong for sure haha).

IdeaCommentPrediction
Idea 1 – World’s Best Coffee (skit)This was an idea I had where I as the boss decide we must do TikTok and the team try to understand it. This one was fun, I hope it goes well. I feel the most confident about this one.
Idea 2 – DN account nervous about doing videoThis is a super short video, just says I’m nervous about doing video but if you want to follow along follow our @eastcoastroastaus Instagram account to see the results. I’m thinking it probably won’t make too much of an impact but we’ll see.
Idea 3 – Results from video marketingI will record this at the end, I’ll do a quick video about what the overall impact of the video marketing efforts throughout the month of April was. As above.
Idea 4 – Latte art compI got the team together to have a latte art comp and gave $50 to the winner, lots of fun. Not sure. It was fun, not sure if people will care.
Idea 5 – How much does coffee costI did a really quick video explaining how we come up with the current price of roughly $40 for our retail 1kg bags of coffee. We will bring up each item on the screen, hopefully that will be interesting to people. On the fence on this one too, let’s see.
Idea 6 – How to roast coffee on the Ailio BulletWe have this very cool little Ailio pilot roaster and I got our head roaster Byron to talk through his process for doing small batch roasts on it.I reckon this one will do ok, it’s a cool bit of kit and I think Ailio will share it, or at least share the story.
Idea 7 – DAITL – Coffee BeanThis was a fun idea that Sarah came up with, we follow a bean on it’s journey through the roaster and into the bag of coffee. She had a weird and fun to do it and it could be really cool or it could be a disaster, we’ll see haha. This could definitely go either way haha.
Idea 8 – Adjust the Grind (skit)This one came about from me and Byron doing a few site visits and him having to constantly tell people to adjust the grind. We turned it into a fun video, hopefully this is the type of video that coffee people will get and enjoy. I think this has the potential of going viral (doesn’t mean it will).
Idea 9 – ECR Equipment TourI got Byron to talk us through how we roast the coffee and say a few things about each piece of equipment. It’s always interesting to see behind the scenes. On the fence.
Idea 10 – OuttakesThere were plenty of outtakes and lots of laughs so the team at Eleven Lights Media will pull together a few into a video and we’ll post that. I think medium haha.

It was an awesome day and I’m feeling good about what’s coming through even though it was my first real effort at video marketing, so good that we’ve already booked in shoot #2.

My viral latte art video

While all of this was happening, I decided to release a really quick video on my own Instagram account @thedannorris on my progress on my latte art since buying the business, and to my absolute surprise, the video has gone somewhat viral (watch it above if you want).

It’s not the first time I’ve had a video go viral, I had a personal video go viral last year which I wrote about here. That video was a personal cooking video with my partner Erin, which got over 1.3m views on TikTok and got our account from 0 to 6,000 subscribers. But because it didn’t relate at all to business, it didn’t really help me too much. And because we didn’t really love turning our fun time into work, we didn’t do too much more with it.

The latte art video was slightly different. It’s very closely related to my current business @eastcoastroastaus and it’s resulted in some decent business outcomes. Here are a few things about the video.

  • I’ve been taking photos of my latte art since I bought the business thinking once it’s borderline acceptable, I’d do a little collage of the progress.
  • One day the other week I thought it was good enough, and asked Erin to film one and it looked OK so I threw up a video super quickly on my personal account. It literally took me about 5 minutes. I put a few of the progress pics in there and the final video of me pouring the decent one. I put the default music on it, and sent it not thinking much about it.
  • It’s had 146,000 views, for some context, the next best on my account is under 7,000. It’s had 82 comments, over 4,000 likes and over 500 shares. I’ve also grown my followers by about 50 or so. @eastcoastroastaus account has grown quite a bit as well, although it’s not possible to know if followers have come from the video.
  • The followers I got are not really relevant at all to me personally or even to my business really, to the extent that they are mostly overseas, not potential customers, not potential partners. But I guess it doesn’t hurt to have more followers rather than less.

So time will tell how useful it is, but it’s not a bad start. Let’s see how we go with the other videos.

Conclusion

I reckon we can build a great brand and following using video content. If you want to follow along, here are some ways you can do that.

If you have any questions or comments on video marketing I’d love to hear them. Hit me up via the comments below or the channels above. At the end of the month I’ll report back with the results.

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