[Top Agency Series] Unlocking Business Growth: Marketing Mastery With Lance Johnson of Amplomedia

Lance Johnson is the Founder and CEO of Amplomedia, an innovative digital marketing agency that assists business growth. He is also the President of Drive Solutions Corp., a strategic consultancy firm delivering expert business strategies to clients in the nonprofit, government, and corporate environments. Lance leverages more than 25 years of experience in marketing and business strategy, helping clients identify how best to engage their audience while effectively communicating their messages with clarity and impact. He is passionate about sustainability and innovation, often integrating these elements into his marketing approaches. He also hosts the Amplify Your Business podcast, which distills entrepreneurial wisdom, offering invaluable insights into building successful businesses.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:54] Lance Johnson discusses the frustrations and strategic shifts that led to the growth of Amplomedia
• [06:57] Creating an effective buyer journey and video marketing strategy
• [10:48] A crane company case study on effective video marketing strategies
• [13:55] How to target different stages of the buyer’s journey with customized video content
• [20:36] Lance shares tips for marketing on LinkedIn and common mistakes to avoid
• [26:15] The strategic growth of Amplomedia and key hires that formed a solid team structure
• [30:30] The challenges and rewards of finding the right VP of Operations
• [37:01] Strategy for establishing referral partnerships and channel partners
• [46:52] Lance discusses his Amplify Your Business podcast

In this episode…

In the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, businesses often struggle with customer acquisition and lead generation. How can companies effectively utilize video marketing and strategize their buyer’s journey to convert potential leads into loyal customers?

Lance Johnson, a serial entrepreneur and marketing expert, delves into the intricacies of marketing strategies that promise to transform your business prospects. He shares his expertise in conversion-optimized marketing strategies, discussing how he transitioned from creating animated explainer videos to establishing a full-service digital agency focused on holistic marketing solutions. Lance explains the critical stages of a buyer’s journey, emphasizing the importance of awareness, consideration, and analysis in crafting successful marketing campaigns. He shares a detailed case study, illustrating how strategic video content can attract attention and facilitate customer conversions. By integrating testimonial videos and product demonstrations, Lance shows how businesses can address potential objections and enhance brand credibility.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Lance Johnson, Founder and CEO of Amplomedia, about leveraging video marketing and optimizing the buyer’s journey. Lance discusses the frustrations and strategic shifts that led to the growth of Amplomedia, creating an effective buyer journey and video marketing strategy, and considerations when marketing on LinkedIn.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Lance Johnson on LinkedIn
• Amplomedia
• Amplify Your Business

Special Mention(s):

• Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant

Related episode(s):

• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Mastering Financial Management for Entrepreneurs with Lillia Sanders” on Amplify Your Business
• “Harnessing AI and Behavioural Science for Talent Management with Imran Syed” on Amplify Your Business
• “The Rise of AI in Marketing: How to Stay Ahead in a Fast-Moving Industry” on Amplify Your Business

Quotable Moments:

• “The power of podcasting is so large that everybody listening right now, if they don’t have a podcast, definitely needs to be talking about it.”
• “Marketing really needs to start with that analysis, asking, ‘what is the typical buyer’s journey amongst the audience you’re trying to target?’”
• “Use LinkedIn to really narrow into that buyer’s persona, pay the premium, then nurture them elsewhere on cheaper platforms.”
• “The biggest mistake in social media is focusing on media, not the social. You have to be social within these social platforms.”
• “For the success of my business, I realized I need to teach clients how to use video better — and eventually do it for them.”

Action Steps:

1. Leverage video marketing strategically: Create targeted videos for different stages of the buyer’s journey — awareness, consideration, analysis, and conversion — to ensure that potential customers receive the right message at the right time.
2. Optimize your LinkedIn presence: By actively participating and engaging with your audience, you increase visibility and foster stronger connections, which can lead to more meaningful business opportunities and partnerships.
3. Implement structured referral programs: Tap into new networks and expand your customer base by leveraging the trust and influence of partners who already have a relationship with your target audience.
4. Focus on building efficient systems: Having robust systems in place is crucial for sustainable growth and can help you manage resources better while maintaining high-quality service delivery.
5. Cultivate a global and diverse team: Diversity can help overcome local market limitations and provide a broader range of solutions and strategies for your business challenges.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:15 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different, I have Lance Johnson of Amplomedia. And Lance, I’m gonna formally introduce you in a second, but I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Since this is part of the top agency series, some of my favorites are, I had Adi Klevit on actually, you talk about this, I listen to some of your stuff. It’s great about streamlining and talking about SOPs and systems. So I had Adi Klevit on who that’s what her business does. She actually comes into businesses and helps them document their processes. And, you know, we talked about our favorite productivity tools, our favorite softwares, and really talked about, how do you streamline onboarding, Client Onboarding, even streamline staff onboarding? So that was an interesting episode.

Another one was from Kevin Hourigan. Kevin Hourigan, runs Spinutech, he’s had an agency Lance since 1995 so it’s interesting to hear the agency landscape, business landscape, the internet landscape over the past couple decades. So that was a good one, too. So check that out on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution.

So Lance we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, but most importantly, run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how to give my best relationships, and I have found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

Lance has a podcast. We’re gonna talk about that as well. And I’m excited to introduce Lance Johnson, the founder of Amplomedia. And they’re a video-first digital agency, and he helps businesses in Canada and the US overcome customer acquisition challenges through conversion, optimized marketing strategies. We’ll talk about what that means. He also has a web series Amplify Your Business, and out of those interviews, he’s distilled the wisdom, which I was hoping was on Audible, maybe sometime Lance will put on Audible, into the secret sauce to building a successful business, a handbook for entrepreneurs. So Lance, thanks for joining me.

Lance Johnson 3:05 

It’s such a privilege to be here Jeremy. Thank you so much for inviting me onto the show, and kudos to you for what you’re doing and helping businesses develop their podcast. I mean, it’s a lot of work for a lot of people to try to figure out the nuances of that production challenge, and to have somebody like you said that you can just hit that easy button. I mean, that’s a dream come true, and the power of podcasting is so large that everybody’s listening right now, if they don’t have a podcast, they definitely need to be talking to you about it, because it’s a huge potential growth opportunity for their business.

Jeremy Weisz 3:37 

Lance, I appreciate that, and I did not pay him to say that, but thank you. I’m gonna pull up your website. Since there is a video pieces, we have to have a video piece, right? Because you’re all about video first. So just talk about Amplomedia and what you do, and we’ll get into it.

Lance Johnson 3:54 

Yeah, yeah. So we started out 13 years ago doing animated explainers, and so we were the first digital studio that focused on that in our marketplace at the time. And it came out of a need in the marketplace. It just wasn’t anybody that was doing it locally and one of the challenges that I was finding is that when we would create these great videos for people, I’d go back six months later and just ask them about how the video was performing for them. Was it helping, kind of move the needle in their business. And most of them were embarrassed to say that, they hadn’t even got it up on their website yet, or they maybe…

Jeremy Weisz 4:32 

To create this amazing thing, and then they didn’t even put it up.

Lance Johnson 4:36 

Exactly right? And so they were happy with the video still, but they just didn’t really know how to use it. And so that was really frustrating from a strategic standpoint. And I came at this business from another business that I had, which was a strategic consultancy. And so it was just really killing that part of me when I would hear that, and I would think, well, it’s easy. I’m never going to sell video number two or three or five if they never experienced a return off of the first video. So I thought, for the success of my business, I’m going to have to teach them how to do this a little better. And so we started to do that. But the problem with it is that most of them didn’t have time to really take our education that we were giving to them for free, and implement it.

And so I started to realize we need to do this for them. And so we started to develop a full-service agency wrapped around that, because as soon as you kind of fixed one thing, there was another thing within the marketing mix that needed to be fixed as well. And so I started looking at and go, ‘okay, well, really, what is the purpose of all this marketing?’ And at the end of the day, it’s about generating new customers. And how do you generate new customers? Well, you have to get the lead awareness first. And so that’s really where we started to pivot our focus. And so we still do a ton of video production, and we weave that into every aspect of, or of our tactics that we roll out as part of the marketing mix for our clients, but with a real focus strategically on, how do we generate those leads?

And then how do we nurture them into really eager prospects that are really interesting having conversations with you, and then how do we turn those conversations into actual closed business. And so that’s what we focus on, is lead generation, customer acquisition, and we leverage the power of marketing and in every aspect we can.

Jeremy Weisz 6:28 

I love how you talk about kind of boiling down to what’s the purpose, right? And you talk about the benefits a lot, and not the features, which is really instructive for me, and I love for you to talk about the buyer journey a little bit, because I know that you help these companies in each kind of aspect of this buyer journey. So maybe start with how you think about the buyer journey when you’re working with customers.

Lance Johnson 6:57 

Yeah, this is one of the things actually that I think it frustrates me when I look at what other companies do, and historically, what the marketing industry has been doing, and I think what has really given the marketing industry a bad name or bad rap over the years, in terms of really not being focused on results and more just focused on, you know, doing marketing for the sake of marketing. And so marketing really needs to start with that analysis as to, okay, so what is the typical Buyer’s Journey amongst the audience that you’re trying to target? And so when I think about it, I break it down into really a simple model. And so if you think of your buyer’s journey as a typical sales funnel. And for those who are just listening right now, I have my hand up, kind of in a V-shape, and so at the top and the wider part of the V is where people are coming in.

And that top activity is really focused on awareness, right? So the audience needs to be aware that you exist before they’ll move into the next stage down that buyer’s journey, which is consideration. And this is where they’re considering you to be a potential solution to whatever problem or challenge that they maybe are experiencing. And then the stage after that is analysis. And so this is where they’re really comparing you to the rest of the options that they have out there. And one of those options that we don’t really talk about a whole lot, usually, from an industry’s perspective, is the option of doing nothing, right? And so just continuing to do nothing is definitely one of those options. But the other analysis that they’re doing is, are you the best fit compared to maybe some of the competitors who are offering something similar. So you have to have awareness before they’ll consider you to be an option. And then you have to pass the analysis test to determine whether or not you’re the best fit.

And if you are, then it comes down to, do I buy or do I take a pass on this? So the conversion, the point of conversion. So that’s the simplified buyer’s journey. And so when we start crafting strategy and start crafting campaigns, what we want to do is we want to make sure that we are communicating to people with the right kind of messaging at each one of those stages of the buyer’s journey. Because if you are communicating to them incorrectly for what stage they’re at, you’re going to lose them right away. So as an example, if we meet somebody virtually online through some social media or an outreach campaign, or whatever the case might be, and we are really focusing on giving them all the information they need at the analysis stage to choose us, to demonstrate that we’re the most skilled at what we do, you’re probably going to lose their attention because you’ve started a conversation with them at a point in which they’re not really looking for that information.

They’re just at a little bit more of that awareness stage, right, and then vice versa. If we keep that conversation and awareness when we know that they’ve been over to the website, we know that they’ve watched a few videos or interacted with some white papers or case studies or whatever the lead magnet might be, and we just keep it at that surface awareness level, we’re going to lose them as well, because we haven’t demonstrated that we’ve passed what they need in terms of the analysis stage. And so it’s about knowing where they’re at and positioning that content into them at the right point in time.

Jeremy Weisz 10:33 

Let’s talk, Lance. There was a crane company. Maybe we could talk about some examples in the kind of the awareness analysis conversion, because I know you create over 100 videos with the company and maybe talk about where they fit in, so people can understand.

Lance Johnson 10:48 

Yeah, yeah. I think they are a really good example, actually. So the company is out of Vancouver, Canada, and so they ship these cranes across North America, well, like even including Mexico, Canada, the US, and so they have a really big footprint, a lot of different kinds of audiences. And so these are big construction cranes for building massive high rises to smaller construction sites as well.

Jeremy Weisz 11:18 

I just want to say one thing, Lance, if this stuff works for a crane company, like, if someone thinks, ‘why am I what?’ I’m sure it could work for you. I mean, crane companies are a real sexy business, of course, but so I love this, because this applies to any business, really.

Lance Johnson 11:34 

Completely. Yeah. And so the crane company, we do a lot of work in the B2B space, and so, you know, they’re marketing themselves to other businesses, is what they’re trying to do. Now, the challenge that they were having is that they just were not getting a lot of leads, and so they had a website that was a placeholder more than anything. It was not conversion-optimized at all. There wasn’t any real flow for the customer to land there, get an understanding as to what these guys did, and then have the persuasion necessary to start to nudge them down that buyer’s journey. And so what we did is we created a bunch of videos that would work at that awareness stage to try to get the traffic over to the website. So those were, then, you know, placed in social media. They were sent out in outreach campaigns and email and LinkedIn, they were also used from a PR perspective as well. And so what we were trying to do there is explain what Bigfoot — it was the name of the company.

Bigfoot Cranes did, and so what was their unique kind of selling proposition? So the very high-level awareness piece, very sexy videos, like you said, like the crane industry, can be kind of cool, because we would throw the drone up and get some great footage of these cranes being erected, that would be 100 feet into the air, and so just really cool, cool videos and it was very manly kind of feel to them and so on, right? Because it was construction industry. And so we created all these really sexy videos, and then the traffic would come into the website. So then once they started looking around at some of the products, what we want to do is make sure that we communicated the product advantages and benefits as well as we could. And so we created a lot of videos on every one of the products and the different feature sets. And this is where we typically get into the how something works. And we start talking about the features as opposed to…

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