The New Sales Debate: Audio-Only vs Video Podcasts w/Guest Rory Nolan

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back everybody. Good to see you, Matt and Rory.

We've only scheduled this what feels like a hundred times and we finally got you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Third time's the charm. Third time's the charm. I just had a string of bad luck, like one thing after another

after another, but I've been looking forward to this. So I know Tim and I know Midnight Marketing and from the LinkedIn window, I've watched you come on board. I watch you start building or reinforcing the brand of Midnight Marketing and then you launch this exquisite podcast. The name of your podcast will put a link in the show notes.

It's not your story. That's the name of the podcast. People, you got to go check it out. It is fantastic. Rory, let's talk about storytelling. This is what you're expert at and this is one of the things that our audiences are learning from this podcast.

So kind of get into a little bit of your journey with storytelling and then how you're using it for business. Well, I think a great place to start off with is a famous quote that I love from one of the greatest storytellers of all time, which I think is Steve Jobs that a lot of us can agree with. And he says, the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.

So that's something that I've really taken and grasped in the work I do with Midnight. Because what we do is we're telling the brand stories of clients that we work with it within the energy space. And that's kind of the idea where the podcast came from. We wanted to translate that methodology.

And as we know, podcasting is such an amazing educational storytelling format for us to build trust and build connections with our audience. Everything that storytelling is about. It's about building trust and becoming a guide for our audience. Yeah, it's really funny the intimacy that you develop with your audience. And as a podcast listener, besides a podcaster, I do the same thing.

There's a marketing podcast called Marketing Over Coffee that I've been listening to for a decade. And I feel like I know the hosts. Now, I actually met them, so I actually now know them. But for nine years, I had never met them and I felt like I know them. And that type of connection is hard to get with any other type of digital media.

Isn't it? Yeah, I think podcasting is, I mean, we've seen a boom in podcasting in the past 10 to 15 years now. And now everybody has a podcast because it's such a powerful format for you to amplify your message. And if you have a story, you can break that down

and distribute that for such a long time. From one podcast episode, you have banks and banks for content just to redistribute. So if anybody hasn't yet and you're a company and you have a story, you have a product, you have a service that you want to sell, start a podcast or get on a podcast and tell your story.

That's what we've always advocated, right? And just get on other people's podcasts, see how it goes, right? Cross-pollinate the audience and then figure out what your story is, what your message is that you want to amplify. And we've seen this with nonprofits a lot too. We're the number of nonprofits.

And I mean, hey, you want to get your story out there. You need video content. You need blogs. You need, you know, ads, like you need all kinds of stuff. You need to add value. Take that and repurpose it, chop it up into a lot of different pieces

and then put it out there to the way that people want to consume. So, all right. Now, Roy, I'm going to ask you a little bit of a controversial question here at OGGN because my own team fights about this. Is a podcast audio? Is it audio and video?

Or is it video? Or is it all three? Okay, so I think there's a couple of ways, there's three ways that you can answer this question. I think first of all, I love the format you guys have and having a co-host is such an awesome way to add balance to the room

rather than just having a straight one-to-one interview format. But I think the benefit of an audio podcast is, it's way easier to distribute. Like we can hop on this call and get this podcast out in a day or two or on the day off, but with a video podcast, it takes a lot more logistics of editing,

you know, matching up video files and a lot of post-production. But I think the benefit of video podcasts is in terms of distribution. Like a video podcast, you can break down into so much short form content. We're seeing a huge trend right now in video content and content marketing. So I think having the ability to break down a long piece of video content is so, so powerful.

That's where I would lean on the fence. I'm Gen Z. I'm in the boat of Gen Z. So obviously the way I consume media is very much video focused. And I think that's the key benefit of having a video podcast versus audio, but nothing against audio podcast because it's such a powerful way to spread your message and amplify it just consistently.

Well, the cool thing in our industry in the oil and gas space is there's a lot of service companies that have tools that basically solve a very important problem. There's hundreds of problems they solve, but sometimes it's complex to explain that. And when you can show it on video, people get it immediately.

Whereas if we're audio only, we're spending too much time trying to explain something that people can't see. We actually did some research ourselves and it's interesting. In our space, in oil and gas space, people prefer the audio only format during the work week. So from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday.

But after work or the weekends, they prefer the same content as video. So to your point, I think, you know, you could start a podcast in the business world, however is easiest for you, but at some point you have to start looking at video. I just think that's the future.

And I've fought against that Rory for five years and I'm finally given into it that, yep, that's where we're going with this. I think both is extremely powerful because when you think about from the user side of things, thinking about the customer, like how do I listen to podcasts?

I listen to podcasts on the go, at the gym, walk into work. But like, as you said, after those work hours, where it's at the weekend, that's when I'm going to be watching video podcasts. You're going to pick up to what I find, at least is so much communication has done non audio, right?

Like non verbally, right? And so I find myself, I like to listen to podcasts a lot, but if I'm sitting still somewhere, I just watch the people talk, right? Like you get to see like the facial expressions, you get to see how they're communicating stuff.

And I guess there's just more that's getting picked up then. And so I just gravitate to video, even though I like listening to it audio, and if you can record it all the ways, you should do that, right? And then you can make the choice on how you want to distribute it.

Yeah, there's no one size fits all. I think you don't have to splash out a ton of cash on an expensive studio. Like anybody has a message that can be amplified, whether that's through video, whether that's through audio. I think the most important part is just first and foremost,

getting yourself out there and spreading your message. Say that again, Roy, because we have a bunch of listeners that keep saying they're going to start doing this and they haven't done it for years because they're scared to put that first piece of content out there. And in my experience, just put it out there.

It's not going to be as good as your 50th piece of content. Just be okay with that. And I think another incredibly important point going back to story to Alan is, when you tell a story, there's a famous study. There's a study of the mirror neurons

that happen between the story teller and the listener. So when you tell a story, the brain activity between you and the listener, a mirror. So if you have something that you want to persuade your audience with, by telling a story, you're getting them on your side. 100%.

Any good salesperson in this industry has a book of stories that are based on real customers where they can share those experiences with future customers. And you're right, the customer gets it. If I send you an Excel spreadsheet with facts and data and stuff, your eyes glaze over.

But if I tell you a story about how we helped a company just like yours in the oil and gas space, you get it. You jive with that, right? I love this. I love where all this is going. So I want to kind of steered us a little bit backwards.

You've been with Midnight Marketing for a little while, but how did you get started on this? Because you're very good at what you do. So I know that you didn't start this eight months ago with Midnight Marketing. So I think I've had a little bit of an unconventional path originally I'm from the UK.

I studied history at university and I think that really helped me understand the power of stories. So naturally that led me into the world of marketing and just since then being able to tell stories through various mediums with Midnight, whether that's branding, whether that's through a website, whether that's with content.

I think just being super clear how important stories are and being able to tell stories in multiple mediums has really helped me along my way and coming from that background of studying history and studying some of the most important stories of the world that have led us to be sat across here today. I think when you go back to humans from an evolutionary standpoint,

the reason we're sat here today across from each other is because our ancestors were able to share ideas through stories and collaborate with each other and that same idea can be applied to your company. The reason your company exists is because you have these stories that together create a brand

and you're able to translate that into your customer to show them that you can solve their problems and make their life better. Dude, that is so powerful tying that back into our ancient history. I love that. I'm also a history buff too. The very first time I ever went to the UK, I was so excited

because here in the US we're a young country. We don't really have a lot of physical history and there's a ton of it in Europe. I got off the plane in London and it was a bunch of Americans. It's like, man, I could have just stayed back in the States but you just get a little bit outside of London

and there's history everywhere. There's still roads, people that the Romans built. I think it's funny how Europeans accepted as normal and I'm like a little kid going, oh my God, look at this and look at this and look at this. I love that historical component of all that.

I do want to actually talk a little bit more about the steps so you're a fantastic storyteller. I've listened to all your podcasts. I've watched two, I think you would have four episodes out now. The fourth is coming up very soon. So three episodes, yeah.

There has to be a science behind what you're doing as well. Can you want to talk a little bit about that? So if we have listeners that are... Story arc, what does your story arc look like of how you structure these things? So I think when it comes to stories,

starting with the end in mind. So I think you guys do great as well. The title of your story sets up the problem and you're offering the solution. For example, lack of brand awareness, what to do about it. So before I go into every episode,

it's planning out what is the end goal. What value am I providing to the listener? How can I, by the end of the episode, what are the takeaways and transformations that they can get out of each episode? So I think that is where you should start off with

if you're doing a podcast. You have to be super intentional with what is the end goal that you have in mind. What do you want to achieve to help out the listener? And I think what has been incredibly helpful is we have such a diverse team of skill sets

and knowledge within our team at midnight that I'm just able to lean on other people's skills, whether that's copywriting, whether that's branding, storytelling, I just go into it of, okay, I'm interviewing our brand manager today, who's an expert in branding.

So I'm going to set that episode up with the transformation in mind. And so if we have listeners that are working for an awful service company or whatever and they're thinking about doing their own podcast, I get this question a lot.

How much work goes in before the interview? So in our case here, all three of us, our personalities are the type where we just jump on the microphone. I do have some notes right here just to kind of keep me on track, but they're five bullet points.

I've seen others actually almost script out the entire episode. So where do you follow that continuum? Like how does your workflow? I think it's a balance because if you over script it and it sounds like a script, it sounds robotic, it's not going to be as authentic.

So I think having the balance between just being comfortable, like you're talking to someone you know, it's just having a conversation with a friend. And it should feel like that. And then people feel like they're a fly on the wall in the room. So I think having a clear outline of the key themes

and topic points, the end goal and transformation, and then depending on how comfortable your guest is, a lot of the time they're just going to take the lead and roll with it. Yeah, it's making guests comfortable. We still have not figured it out.

One of my podcasters, our industry leader podcaster before the pandemic, used to have a private room at this pub. And literally she would put a couple of drinks in her guests to calm them down. And it was wonderful. It worked wonderfully.

But you can't always do that, especially in the corporate world, right? We can't have the Jack Daniels out when some mobile ones join. Is there any other things that you'd like to do to help calm a guest down and have them just be authentic?

I think sometimes sharing with them, like what do you want to share? Like what is the piece of knowledge that you're most comfortable sharing with the world? Because if I'm creating an outline that is completely off topic and it's topics that my guest is not comfortable sharing

and having expertise in, I think you have to, same with when you create content and telling a story, you have to have your audience in mind and you have to have your guests in mind at the same time. Yeah, that does make a big difference. If you can share kind of where the questions you may ask

or the direction may go, people do calm down. The other thing I always tell people is what I told you right before we turn the record button on is that you can't screw this up. It's not live, right? Yeah.

So audience, you'd be amazed at the things that Matt and I screw up that you never hear because we edited out. No. That makes it easy for people to relax to realize, because I think most of the time people are worried they're going to look foolish, right?

Yeah. And the ability to take parts of it out, I think, helps calm them down. Well, people don't like how they sound. People don't like how they look, right? People are uncomfortable putting themselves out there.

And I don't know, Roy, you have a lot of data, which I think is fantastic. I mean, there's got to be data on the genious aspect of when people connect with people, with the stories and who they are, unless you put your guard down to a certain degree

and connect on that one-on-one human level. People do business with people they know I can trust. Like if you are so guarded, it comes through, right? Yeah. And so I think podcasting is a way to let your guard down and let people connect with you and see a different side of you

and then they gravitate to that, right? And I'm just curious your perspective on that and what you've seen. So I think that's an incredible point. Like you said, people buy from people they know and trust. And how can you get to the point where they know and trust you?

I know Matt, you've spoke all about this in your book. It's an incredible guide to your audience. And how can you do that? Not just through podcasting. I think another great example is personal branded content versus brand content.

People don't want to interact with content that feels like an advertisement, but if you're posting authentically through your personal page, you see with the data personal branded content will perform much better than branded content. So that can also be applied to podcasting,

just breaking down that rigid wall and getting comfortable, being uncomfortable and sharing your story is so incredibly powerful. I love the fact that Roy read your book, Matt, in preparation. Maybe he read it for not preparation.

I don't know. I just love the fact that he did his research. That's amazing. But I do want to go back, Roy, to that personal branding versus corporate branding. So for the longest time in our industry,

because these are some of the largest companies in the world, basically legal and HR was scared of their employees putting out personal branding messages because it may reflect badly on the company, like Exxon or Chevron or Halliburton, right? And I'm starting to see some of that change

where these companies are letting their people post personal content and they're accepting that risk. But what's happening, I think, is that it's making it easier for people to connect with those companies on a personal level versus a corporate level.

So how, you know, if you're running a large company and you're listening to this podcast, how would you balance that? How would you balance letting your employees post things that are personal content for themselves but at the same time, you want to make sure

that they don't hurt the corporate brand? I think it's incredibly powerful to rip the bandaid off and empower your employees to create their own content because, like we discussed, people buy from people they know and trust and when you're creating content

and pulling out your knowledge consistently, people, if you want to make a sale, it's going to make the bottom line much better for your company. So there's a huge amount of value for companies to empower their employees to create content, in my opinion. And we agree.

I mean, the whole premise of this podcast here is we think marketing and sales should be joined at the hip. They should not be two separate organizations. Each one has something that benefits the other one. And that personal branding is a way to help amplify your marketing.

And quite frankly, if you run a large company and you have a large marketing budget, imagine having 100 workers for free. If you let your employees do some personal branding around your company, you're basically getting content created for free.

Like, so there's a financial benefit of doing it as well. It's the cheapest way to advertise, in my opinion. That's millions of impressions and influence that you haven't even had to invest any resources in. So I think it's a no-brainer personally. All right, I want to ask you some technical questions.

And by the way, audience, we have not rehearsed anything. So one of the things I've noticed, and I think this might be a generational difference and I want to know why, is you promote your content on Spotify first versus other platforms like Apple Podcasts.

And there has to be a reason for it. I'm curious what that reason is. That's a great question. I think for me personally, it might just be a personal bias in the way that I consume content, which is predominantly on Spotify,

but I have learned in the process of this journey of starting a podcast to the power of platforms and distributors like Apple Podcasts in the way that they can spread and distribute your podcast to new audiences. But I think for me, it's just been from a bias

of how I consume content. And I think my generation consumes content through Spotify and YouTube predominantly. But you have to have in mind how can you adapt your message to different audiences. So I think having your podcast on an RSS feed,

whether that's Apple Podcasts, you should try and get your podcast in as many different touch points as possible because like I said, people consume content very differently. When I tell you this for a year,

laugh, you think I'm making this up. So we've been doing this for 10 years. Early, when I would look at the traffic, about 20% of our traffic for our podcast downloads came from desktops, which means that people were sitting

for 30 minutes in front of their computers listening to us on the podcast, which seems asinine. But this industry is kind of old-fashioned. And as we've went through time, Apple was the 800-pound gorilla.

Spotify has taken a lot of market share from Apple. And when I look at Spotify, I look at them as being kind of the grown-up punk rockers. So originally, they were the punk rock people in high school. They were counterculture. They did things differently. And they still have that, but they've kind of grown up.

They figure out how to monetize it. They figure out how to compete at the video format with YouTube. And I think Spotify is killing it. I think Apple needs to change what it's doing, or it's going to lose its place as number one.

Mark, did you see the new integration at the OS level two days ago? They basically said chatGPT is going to be integrated at the OS level on the iPhone in the next update. Dude, if we get off from this conversation,

this is going to run for four hours. So we actually watched the World Wide Developers Conference live. I'd do it. I know it's a geeky thing to do. And I was shocked what they were doing. Not only with chatGPT making it an option, but the fact that Apple's keeping its own AI sandbox

inside of Apple, which is their culture, right? I would not want to be in the AI world right now. When you have Google, Microsoft, and Apple all jumping money into AI, there's no way you can compete. Tesla's going to compete. He's going to jump in it.

You think so? Oh, yeah, 100%. That's why he bought Twitter. He wanted to scrape all the AI off there to use human. So he's got the car data, and he's got Twitter data. Like 100%. See, I think his ultimate goal is commercialization of space.

And I think Tesla and Twitter and everything else is just a way to monetize and get him out there. I fully expect, maybe not in my lifetime, but in my son's lifetime, that we'll be watching whatever screen that's available in 50 years from now.

And you're going to see blue and red space vehicles mining asteroids. And the blue ones are going to be labeled slumberjay, and the red ones are going to be labeled Halliburton. I fully expect that to happen. I think Musk's going to lead the way.

But we'll see. We'll see what he's doing with AI. I don't know what he's doing with Twitter or with X. This recent thing of making likes ambiguous. I don't see the benefit in that. Now, I'm not going to lie.

I now can like the Bajibis out of stuff, and nobody knows it's me, right? It's just kind of anonymously fun. But everything he does, there has to be a reason. So to your point, Matt, I don't know what his in-game is, but I like to guess.

I think you're right. It's Mars. But I also think he's super concerned about where AI is going. I mean, he helped start OpenAI, and he's been pretty vocal about some stuff. And I mean, if you watch any, I've watched a number of podcasts of like X AI employees

and all this kind of stuff, like DeepMind, they don't know where the world's going to be in two years. Like they can't even predict. They're like, we don't know what's going to happen. And Elon was saying, well, you know, the only way to compete with the superintelligence

is another superintelligence, right? And so you're going to have, it's going to be the Titans, right? It's going to be the... You can't beat them, join them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And at what point is the Google AI going to be proofreading another AI to see if the content is relevant, even though it's noted... Well, Gemini's doing it. ...by a person. Yeah.

Gemini's leaking some deals, man. Like, this is going to get pretty rowdy. I think it's going to get pretty rowdy here. You know, I'm not worried about the Terminator AI effect where the AI takes over the world. I just know that as AI gets better,

it's going to make me think I want to buy stuff because I want to, and it just fooled me. Like, in fact, it may already be happening. I don't know. Look at the Amazon packages.

The streaming Amazon packages that are coming. Right? Yeah, we're starting to go off track here. Something terrifying just to get us back, but something terrifying that I discovered recently is that you can clone your voice with AI.

There's a tool called Eleven Labs, and whilst we were experimenting and testing with the podcast, my editor cloned my voice and we transcribed it into like six different languages. So now with Eleven Labs and AI tools, you can create with AI your podcast in whatever language you want.

And you could run an AI podcast. You could just put in the transcripts and record an AI podcast, and some people might not even know it's not you. Roy, don't give us an idea for another part. I do sort of like that. Who is the actress that's actually suited that company for her voice?

Oh, Scarlett Johansson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all that stuff is really fascinating, because then you start thinking, who has ownership of that intellectual property of the voice? Right?

Because they're not recording her and then using it, because that's different. You're actually copying her actual voice. They're training the machine learning and the AI model to mimic her. So it's really not her. So it's a very interesting ethical quandary there.

Yeah. There's another debate that came up recently with Adobe, where they have a similar contract in that they put in their terms to say that we have full usage and access to all of your data, and that's very confidential company data. And there's a huge controversy going on right now with Adobe

and a lot of other companies, because it's an ethical concern. Like, who has ownership of all of this content? Even in oil and gas. So all the data they collect when they're drilling, say offshore somewhere,

there's fights going on right now legally on who owns that. Is it the service company that's drilling? So is it Slumberjay who's amending that rig? Is it TransOcean who owns the rig that's drilling? Or is it Exxon who hired them both to drill this well for them? Who owns all that data?

And the industry hasn't figured it out yet, but that data is the value in the future. And I think a lot of the data around us and social is also worth the fortune. It's already worth the fortune, but I think that value's only going to go up.

Man, guys, we have like all over the place. Let's kind of bring it back, because we're at 26 minutes and we're trying to keep this thing at a half hour. So, Rory, you know, we have a lot of big companies that work in our space that listen to podcasts

that are still on the fence about storing a podcast. So what would you tell those companies? What would you tell that chief marketing officer that's trying to figure out if they should start a podcast or not? I would say start today.

If you don't have the time and resources to create your own studio and set up yourself, definitely look into featuring on other podcasts and telling your story through that. Because, I mean, even if your executives go on two to three podcasts a year,

that's a year's worth of content that you can redistribute and tell your story. So if you don't want to go through the time and resources of setting up a studio and handling the logistics, just get on podcasts and tell your story,

because it's such a powerful way to amplify your message and make a sale at the end of the day. And we agree 110%. All right, let's start winding these things down. A couple of things.

The link to Roy's LinkedIn profile is in the show notes. As is the link to his podcast, I'm going to put both the Spotify link and Apple, since Roy loves Spotify. Audience, you know, we have the two newsletters, sign up for both.

We have our AllGas Events newsletter. We have our Sunday update, which is frickin' killing it. Roy, I'll give you a good lesson on marketing people. My marketing team brought me the idea of this Sunday update podcast at the end of last year. And I knew they would fail,

because the newsletters have gotten so spammy. And so I let them do it so they could fail and learn a lesson and they proved me wrong. That thing has been crazy. Zero to 20,000 subscribers in the first month. And now I think we're pushing close to 70,000 subscribers.

So companies, listen to your marketing team. A lot of times they're right. All of Matt and I's links to all our social channels are also in the show notes. If you want to follow us anywhere that makes you happy. Matt and I were just talking about our Insiders group.

It's coming. Just have some patience. I know a whole bunch of y'all waiting for us to launch it. It will happen this year. It'll happen before the last quarter of this year. All right, Roy, this is where we get to our LinkedIn fail

tip of the week. Do you have a fail tip for our audience? I have a huge tip. So recently LinkedIn introduced, they beta introduced a video feed on LinkedIn. And if you're not already creating video content,

I would suggest create video content now. Because just like YouTube, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, I guess I apologize on behalf of my generation for the TikTok verification of all media, LinkedIn is next on the list. So get started.

So explain that, Roy. I'm not quite understanding. So LinkedIn has a video short feature now? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So if you look on your feed now and you scroll on a video,

you can start scrolling as if you're on an Instagram real or a TikTok feed. So that is coming soon. Yeah. And speaking of AI, if you're working for a large company and you're worried about creating content

for things like LinkedIn and video shorts, you probably have it. You just don't know it. And there's probably AI tools that can help you create it unbelievably easily. And it's getting actually really good.

It's getting actually scarily good. My marketing team used the AI tool. It's built into this Riverside, what we're recording on. And it just goes in and creates the shorts for you. It puts the captions. And the more you let it know if you like it or don't,

the better it gets at it. And it is amazing what you can do with technology now. And if you want some help with that, Matt's probably the person to reach out to. If you want some help with marketing in the oil and gas space, reach out to Roy and his company.

Happy to share that. Roy, make sure you tell Bella hi. Speaking of content marketing, she's all over the place, right? And Matt and I actually had her on the show a few months ago. How's the alien doing?

Oh, he's making his way around the world. We just had him on the podcast last week, but Bella's out in Houston and spreading our message with Schmi's the alien. If you don't know what we're talking about, listen to Roy's podcast or go check out Midnight Marketing.

Tell Bella she owes you lunch for getting her some more exposure on this podcast. All right, Roy, we're going to get you back later. But I do realize that you're in Canada. You're in Montreal? Yeah, I'm in Montreal.

Because we'll be in Calgary in a couple of weeks. That's the other side. So don't worry about it. But man, we got to get you back. You're a brother in arms here. I love what you're doing.

Your podcast is fantastic. It's on my personal playlist. So people can listen. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. We got to get out of here.

So remember, make a difference and not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com

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