 thing. There's always an education hurdle with a new product. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams and we have a great show lined up for you today. We have Sean Collins, who's the Chief Vision Officer at Premier Outdoor Living, as well as the host of the hardworking happy hour on the show with us today. Sean, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Zach. I appreciate it. For our listeners that don't know you, I was just telling you that I went down a rabbit hole and was checking out your content and you have like 300,000 followers on YouTube. And this is just one of your channels. I watched, I don't know how many hours of like time lapse videos of you on a construction site, which was very cool. But for our listeners, give us a little bit of background on your business, what you do, and on your different social media and content channels. I started out with Premier Outdoor Living in 2015. Previous to that, I was doing a landscaping business, kind of just, you know, something to get by mowing some lawns and had the opportunity to do a backyard project with a deck and a patio. Really didn't have much experience in it, but kind of talked my way into it and just absolutely loved the creative aspect of it. And the project turned out pretty good. And immediately after that, I got rid of my lawn and landscape business and jumped right into creating these unique outdoor living spaces with no prospects for work, no reputation, no portfolio. But just kind of felt this passion that this is what I want to do and I'm going to figure it out. So that was 2015. For the first couple years, I decided, well, you know, we just want to build these very unique spaces. So I'm not going to worry about money for the first two years. I'm just going to worry about developing a portfolio and showcasing that through social media. So after those first two years, they were a little bit rough, not making a whole lot of money, but I was super passionate about it. I was having the time of my life working 80 hours a week, probably, but loving every minute of it. And after about those first two years, it worked. We had developed this online reputation, a great portfolio. And now, eight years later, we are just continuing that. And for the last four years, we've really been trying to maximize our audience online. So that's kind of a separate part of our business now creating the content about what we're building. But it's another way that I get to be creative and do something fun with the backyards that we're building. Is your biggest following on YouTube or is it Instagram? YouTube's our biggest audience. We just hit 300,000 subscribers two or three days ago, which was pretty cool. We're just about 800,000 followers across our main five platforms. So we try to be everywhere. We don't want to be too reliant on one platform because you never know, they can come and go like MySpace did many years ago. So we want to be everywhere and all of our different platforms have a slightly different audience. So it's good to just be everywhere that we can. Did you know when you started doing this in 2015 that YouTube was going to be this big for you? If I think back to 2015, YouTube was big for sure, probably not to the extent that it is right now, in terms of the ability for monetization, getting deals with manufacturers from your standpoint, things like that. Like talk me through that progression of maybe when the light bulb went off for you. I started out in 2015, all of the social media stuff was really just to get leads locally. We were doing it in a somewhat traditional format, but doing it on social media, that was kind of a little bit of a advantage I had as being somebody that was a little bit younger than most of my competitors in the area. So we did that for a couple of years and that kind of grew organically. We probably had about 10,000 followers total. But then in 2019, I decided I didn't want to go down the road of trying to scale the construction side of the business. It didn't really fit my skill set and it wasn't something I was super passionate about. I wanted to just do all the things I love doing, building, creating, designing, and I thought that there was a very unique opportunity with the expanding market that outdoor living was becoming and not a lot of people really focusing the business on creating content on what they're doing. So in 2019, I decided again, we're going to go all in and kind of like I did with the jobs in the beginning, I was like, I'm not going to worry about followers or return on investment for at least a year. I'm just going to make as many videos as I possibly can. And again, it was a lot of fun and a lot of work, but that first year we went from nothing on YouTube to about 3,000 subscribers and made about a hundred videos. So it was a lot of work and didn't make anything off of it that first year for many over thousands of hours it took, but the snowball kind of started rolling and by early 2021, we hit 100,000 subscribers. So two years later, we're just at 300,000 and almost had 100 million views on YouTube, which just blows my mind when I think of that number for just building backyards. Did you have a snowball moment where one piece of content just started to pick up steam for you? It was a series of multiple. So the thing that really catapulted the channel was right around the beginning of COVID. A lot of people were searching for how to build a deck, backyard inspiration, all of those things. Everybody was doing home projects. So the search traffic was through the roof and luckily we were in a position where we had already started that snowball. So we had a good library of content and we had a couple videos at that point that really just shot up. There was one day and I can still go back and look at our YouTube analytics. There's a huge spike. One day it was like May of 2020 and we got almost a million views just in one day. You hit the algorithm. I hit the algorithm and one of our videos just shot up and that started it from there on. It continued to grow and that was the biggest thing for me was I knew I had to stick with it because one of them will go off, but you can't expect the first one or the second one or the tenth or the twentieth. You just have to keep making them and as long as you feel like it's good content, eventually it's going to get found and YouTube's going to find your audience that enjoys it and that happened and it was super exciting. Especially that first YouTube video that hit a million views was super exciting for me. Talk me through if you're a manufacturer and this is where I want to shift our conversation, Sean. A lot of manufacturers out there, maybe they've worked with an influencer in some capacity. Maybe they haven't. If you're a manufacturer or you're working on marketing side of one of these companies, what are the things that you would look out for in terms of working with an influencer and what would you stay away from? Like I want to hear like, okay, if someone says this, like don't believe them. If they say this, this is a good opportunity. Be as real with me as possible if you can. I think there's a lot of different ways to look at it. It's a very trendy thing that manufacturers want to get involved with this influencer culture and want to grow their social media presence. And there's a few different ways to look at an influencer. You have an influencer that can just give you eyeballs, so impressions. They can represent a whole bunch of different things that are direct competitors to you. They might just do one video for you and they might want a certain premium for it, but I look at that, like you can buy impressions, you can buy Instagram ads, you can buy Facebook ads, you can advertise on Google. The thing that really starts to bring value is their full, confident recommendation of your product. And that can only come with an exclusive relationship with that person. So we work with a few brands that we absolutely love and we've been with since the beginning of this because we really felt like they were the best products for us. So that authenticity and that exclusivity is the most valuable thing. That's the thing that's kind of hard to quantify. You can quantify impressions and views and all of that because if it's just giving you exposure and it's not coming with that full recommendation from that influencer, it's not worth as much. So that's the thing that I would really look out for as a manufacturer. Make sure that you're partnering with somebody that is super authentic, that doesn't necessarily have to have the biggest following, but really fits what your brand is trying to do and fits that brand messaging. And make sure that they're exclusive to you because if they represent you and then next month they're doing a video for a direct competitor, it's really all you did was pay for those impressions. You're not paying for any sort of exclusive recommendation from that person. What manufacturers out there are doing this the right way? Who should I be following to go, man, these guys are doing it from a strategic standpoint the way that you're talking about? Decorators. We work with decorators in the decking space and we've worked with them since 2019. And it was a very organic relationship that started. We were making content, we were using the product, we loved it. And I was very, very slow to make any partnerships in the beginning because I know as soon as I partner with somebody and I say it's the greatest, we love it, we just can't get enough of it. And then the next year maybe that deal fizzles out and the relationship expires and you go on to the next one. You can only do that one or two times before everyone knows that you're a phony and you're just at it for the money. So I knew from the very beginning it had to be a long term partnership that both sides see a future together and it has to be authentic. At the end of the day, I believed in what we were doing and that the right deal or right partnership would come along. I wanted to make sure that I fully believed in the product and I could say without hesitation, we love using it, you should use it too. And we think that you're going to love it when you use it. Where do you see the creator and influencer space going, Sean? I want to specifically know what channels do you see that there's opportunity in and tactics do you see as opportunity in? If I look at what Twitter now X is doing, they're now paying their creators. I think MrBeast I saw posted something like he got however many tens of thousands of dollars paid out from Twitter recently. Where are you pushing into and where do you see that there's opportunity? I think there's opportunity everywhere that there's users. That's why we always tried to be everywhere. We don't want to focus all of our efforts on one platform. A lot of people you'll see do that, especially on Instagram. There's a lot of Instagram influencers that really don't have much of a following outside of Instagram. And I always felt like I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket. I want to spread it out and you do hit different demographics there. So I think there's an opportunity on all the platforms. I think the biggest opportunity from a creator standpoint and from a manufacturer partnership standpoint is YouTube. YouTube is really the only platform that you can garner people's attention for an extended period of time. Things in the building industry. There's brand recognition. There is all these little things that you can get across in a five second Instagram video or a TikTok or just a picture on Facebook. But a lot of things in the building materials industry are education based. So you have to have your audience's attention. You have to teach them something. There's always an education hurdle with a new product that that a manufacturer is trying to push. So YouTube is the place where you have your audience's attention. An average view for us on Instagram is probably 10 to 15 seconds because most videos are only 30 seconds or so. On YouTube our average watch time on the video that we just posted is almost 10 minutes. So it's a huge difference of audience and attention. And if somebody's watching you for 10 minutes and they're choosing to watch you for 10 minutes, that in itself just blows my mind because nobody can pay attention to anything for 10 minutes, let alone me talk about building a deck in a patio. So that's where I think the most value is for the creator, for the partner, for everybody involved. That's the space I think holds the most opportunity. I don't think we have short attention spans. I think we have short evaluation spans. That's why a lot of YouTube creators focus a lot on the hook or what's the beginning thing that I'm looking at or what's my thumbnail because we want to bring people in. And what you're doing, Sean, is you've already won the evaluation period of your viewers. They already trust you. So that leans back on, if you were to rep a product in some capacity, I really love this manufacturer product, you should check it out. You're kind of doing the same thing but in a purchase scenario, not just a watch scenario. So I think you've garnered the trust of your audience base, which is why they're willing to watch for that length of time. And your videos are great. Yes, thank you. We've always tried to tread that balance between education and entertainment. That was always really important from the beginning. People are going to search for how to build a deck. And they're going to watch one of those videos, but we wanted to create something where people just tune in every week. Every Sunday at 8 a.m., a new premier outdoor living video is going to come out on YouTube. And we want to gain that audience that looks forward to it. And they're going to watch it no matter what we're building to get a couple of tips to just laugh a couple of times and just to see what we're building. So for our listeners, if they want to connect with you, Sean, if they want to reach out, what's the best way for them to do that? Best way is on any of our socials for manufacturers and dealers. The place that I connect with them most of the time is LinkedIn. So it's just my name, Sean Collins, Guru, Instagram, TikTok, Premier Outdoor, YouTube, Facebook, Premier Outdoor Living. If you just type Premier Outdoor into Google, one of our channels will definitely come up and you can see what we're all about. Sean, man, thank you so much for being generous with your time and sharing about your journey as well as some strategies. This has been awesome. And for our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, check us out at venue.com slash podcast to subscribe and get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams. Thanks, everybody.