Jesse Chard

Jesse Chard started his career as a producer and journalist in traditional media, as his skills developed he later saw the huge potential in storytelling for content marketing. He now leads crews around the word to create world-class story telling, and have developed intricate video content marketing strategies to build (and effectively sell to) an engaged audience.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Jesse’s success

Understanding topic demand and using analytics combined with sound editorial judgement

Result if you follow the steps in Jesse’s session

High audience retention rates

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

There’s a great guy called Jay Baer, and he has this book, that’s called Utility. And it’s all you wire utility. And it talks about how you have to basically give the audience something useful, you have to give them a takeaway, if you want them to come back, you know, to you in some way, shape, or form.

Now what utility is, can be very broad. But generally speaking, it’s if you have a way to kind of connect with your audience, I mean, I sort of have my own sort of four basic things that I think that you need to do as a video content creator or to choose as a video content creator.

The first one in this is kind of comes down to where we’re talking about, you know, those sales tools, if you want to effectively communicate sales comes from a top down level. You know, this is where the old school selling techniques and those old school videos that I was talking about before can come in really handy.

The only thing with that is you just lose a bit of, you lose a bit of credibility, especially with millennials. So millennials know when they’ve been sold to and very, you know, rarely would you get click throughs through on a minute millennial audience and lists super relevant.

Where I kind of come into it more is like with number two, is like engaging on a human or an emotional level, individual storytelling. This is good for people who are like entrepreneurs who wants to share a bit of their story, so that it’s more of a humanistic aspect to their product.

Number three for us is providing something new useful. So things like how to guides or something that users can take away, or just worth their weight in gold, because that very, you know, that’s a way to connect with an audience because you’re getting something that they need.

And then there’s also the more sort of like effective devices like visual storytelling or like, you know, certain kind of techniques that you can use with, you know, video editing. And it’s something you see a lot in travel, like, there’s a new sort of style of video content creation, where it’s much about as much about the sort of the high production value. That’s rare, I wouldn’t use that too much.

But occasionally, I mean, or let’s call it a viral video, or creating something that isn’t quite something that you can take away, but it hits you on an emotional level or makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it does gives you an emotion, you know, so in there, there’s sort of four basic ones.

I mean, obviously, there’s going to be a little bit, you know, here and there in terms of gray area. But that’s, that’s sort of you should be doing one of those four things.

One other important one is like, this is where it comes down to connecting with your audience personally, you know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a storytelling thing, it could just be communication, it could just be Hi, I’m so and so, I’m going to share this with you, I’m going to share my life with you.

That’s better for things like YouTube, you know, this is where the concept of being a vlogger comes in. And YouTube is basically vloggers. Now like, it’s essentially become a medium for vlogging. It’s the most popular sort of content format on YouTube. I want to just explain the concept of vlogging to everyone.

So vlogging is basically a way that you can share, you know, a story, or you know, it could be a how-to, it could be, you know, I’m thinking this today, this is my opinion, this is my personal sort of ethos around something, it could be, you know, silly skits or something like that. It’s a way that you can connect with your audience.

So you look at top YouTubers like Janna Marbles, Pewdiepie, and NPD, about $47 million a year just playing video games, and he’s just real ease being able to relate to that audience on that huge level, because he has something that is kind of unique. And a lot of the top YouTubers are very much, they’re identity-driven, they have a very specific identity and their audience connects to that.

Now whether the audience watching this today is going to go down the vlogging route is up to them. If they feel that they have something that drives them personally, if they have opinions of, it’s a very opinionated medium, vloggers get on, they really say this is what I think about this, and you should hit subscribe and share my kind of every day.

And that’s where, you know, vlogging because YouTube does require you to create content every you know, couple of days.
At least vlogging is a cheap and easy way to do that. So you can actually, all you need to do is just have a decent camera. And you know, being able to do some basic editing with an audience.

And then you’ve got to have something to say, you know, this is where you’ve got to have a strong personality, you’ve got to have an identity, you’ve got to have all of those rubrics about who you are as an individual fully formed before you go on camera. And charisma goes a long way too, reasonably good-looking.