 Watch some other videos in your industry. See what they're doing. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. And in the studio today, we have someone who is going to talk about all of the missed opportunities for manufacturers who are not nailing it with homeowners, which is a hotly contested audience about whether or not we should even be going after them. And so I'm excited to bring Dennis Cobb-Stock into the studio with us. He is the founder and the brain behind Builder Brigade, who has a huge following on Instagram and TikTok, all talking about what homeowners need to know in their home building process. Dennis, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you, Beth. I appreciate you having me. I'm excited to dive into it because there's a lot of feelings in the industry around the customer channel of homeowners, and you've got a great purview into it and are really building bridges between homeowners and builders and manufacturers, kind of without anybody telling you to do it, which is cool. Um, but before we get into it, Dennis, can I just ask you take a few minutes for our listeners who may not know you, introduce yourself, what you do and introduce the Builder Brigade. Sure. Yeah. So, um, I started Builder Brigade a couple of years ago. It, um, actually started off not as just home building stuff. It was like a woodworking type thing. And then I just posted about my house and started posting some lessons learned when I was having my house built. And then it just kind of like evolved from there. And then I started realizing how much, not necessarily misinformation, but non-information for homeowners when they're having a house built. So I started making, you know, videos on lessons learned and lessons learned from my buddies who were building at the same time and just sharing that with everybody and then created a checklist to kind of summarize everything I was talking about. So, you know, people could just find it all in one spot and then seeing how much people were digging the checklist. And that just led into more content. And then now it's just revolving cycle of creating more content for homeowners. I'm getting homeowners and builders and contractors, you know, reaching out to me, giving me tips to kind of share with everyone else. So yeah, it's just been amazing on how helpful it's been for a lot of people. From a content creator standpoint, Builder Brigade is peak dream for a social media platform or social media profile because you've done it. You built the community. There's incredible conversations happening. And once you're getting your audience reaching out to you, giving you ideas of content to create, like that's how you know, you've really done a thing. You're no longer pushing it all out, but it's just all like you're getting this inbound inquiry. So true. I never really thought about it like that because it is. It's just very, I guess, natural in the sense to where I almost have so much to cover that there's not enough time in the day to where I'm in that weird spot of trying not to rush videos, but to still make them look good, but trying to answer as many questions as I can. I never really thought about it like that. Yeah. So tell me when did you launch it? You said you started a couple of years ago, but when did you officially launch your Instagram? Um, I guess it wasn't really official. Honestly, the Instagram thing I was, I started posting on TikTok and then those videos were really well first. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. A couple of videos went viral and I was posting on there and then I just started taking those videos and pushing them over to Instagram and then cleaning them up. And then it just kind of organically grew from there. So now it's just one of those things to where you just make the video once and you can just push it across all of different platforms because everyone's kind of spread out. It's funny. I always ask people this random question of like, what social media platform do you use most? And it's very interesting to see just the different age gaps where some people are still on Facebook and some TikTok and then some are just super heavy and Instagram. Okay. That's very interesting. So just for our listeners' sake, so you don't have to Google things while you're potentially driving. Dennis's Instagram, the Builder Brigade Instagram is 282,000 followers. TikTok has 554,000 followers. Your videos on TikTok have over nine and a half million likes. But if I'm hearing you, this is all grassroots. This is social media kind of at its best where you are creating content in an interesting way that answers questions that people have. And so people just follow you and engage with your content. I mean, that is like, it works. Like all the things that we believe about social. You make me look at my page like, what is this guy's page about? So often we see this and it's the collars, it's the big budget, it's the mega dollars or it's the big influencers who have kind of just hardcore sold out or they had an Instagram when it first came out. But being able to hear someone say like, yeah, I just had really good conversations. I heard that people needed this information. And so I just leaned into short form content also right at the right time. Like there's always a little bit of luck when these things go well. I hope that's okay for me to say. For sure. Yeah, timing is everything. So talk to me a little bit about your process for creating short form content. What are you finding that's working and making it sustainable? For our listeners, I was chatting with Dennis. It's just him and his wife. There's not like some magical media team behind them. I need one. If somebody wants to be a media team, just reach out to me and we'll figure something out. It's getting overwhelming for sure. I would say more topics to cover than I can, than I have time for. But I would say to answer your question, there's just a few key things I think we see probably if you just look up the question on social media is the first three seconds, three to five seconds is key on a video. You're kind of trying to capture someone's attention for that three to five seconds and then just enough to where you can offer them good valuable information. So a lot of times some of the mistakes I see from people who are making videos is that first three seconds is somebody who's frozen in front of the camera about to speak and they do that for three seconds. Well, all of us in this room are going to flick and go on to the next video. So that first three seconds is key, whether it's a hook, you know, which is a hook is a title that would be on the video that says what you're going to talk about. And then if you don't use a hook or you can use it in conjunction with the hook is something that's just like moving or just captivating, you know, when when I'm going to go ask somebody a question, I'm coming around the corner to ask somebody a question. I'm not just starting with their face looking at me blankly. So I guess hopefully that explains it enough to just keep it dynamic. I guess in that first three seconds and not have your spinning logo floating in with background music. Yes, I think that's the that's the idea. So just try to keep it organic and real as possible. Almost like you're sending somebody a video through text, right? You're sending your buddy a video. You kind of want it to look like that, but you're able to give them super valuable information that they walk away with like, oh, that is awesome. They're either going to save it, send it both, you know, and everybody wins. You win, they win, everyone's happy. Okay, so you're saying something that is really smart. And a thing that we have found ourselves talking about constantly recently is like, what's the takeaway and not the like corporate, like, here's our top takeaways, but like, what's the sound bite you've given someone? That's what starts to make things shareable is that repeatable piece that everybody starts to know is general knowledge, like carrots are really good for your vision, but like those types of things of like, it just becomes this repeatable thing. So often what happens to short form content is we just see the time limit. And then we use the time limit as the pressure versus understanding we should just be talking about one thing. So it fits into the time. It's not a challenge of how much can you jam in to 90 seconds if you want it to be a real as an example, but rather it's that time limit is there because the platforms know people are only going to spend that amount of time watching your video. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I'm to a point now to where I'll start with a paragraph, two paragraphs of things. Then I start shortening it and shortening it and I'll get it down to just a couple of sentences to keep it that short, but all the stuff that you're pulling away can also be used for another video. And I think people would much rather receive that information and almost those buckets because they're just not overwhelmed. Like if you're talking about something you talk about all the time, you're going to just barf it out as fast as you can and just and they're they can't receive it. It's just too much, but you know, and you're like instantly in the weeds too. When it's a topic that you know, you're just like instantly in the weeds. Even as we're talking, I'm trying to catch myself of what words are we, you know, like you said hook and then you explained it because I'm like, okay, do we need to explain hook? Like I said 90 seconds. I need to talk about how that's a real, like I'm, you've got to pull yourself up out of the being the SME, like deep in the weeds and like do the explain like I'm five. Yes. And okay, this is what I try to explain to like friends. It's talking to my dad the other day. He's like, what the hell do you do? We were in the information age years ago, right? It was like, we're in the information age. You can get as much information as you need at your fingertips. Well, now we're in the organize the information and just make it consumable it because with that vast amount of information, we don't know what's right. We don't know what's wrong. Just sorting through it all is a job in itself. So being able to give the audience somebody that they can trust and know that they're going to get good valuable information and they're learning something, that's, that is kind of it in a nutshell of kind of what we're trying to do. Okay. So I want to dig into that a little bit, especially if you're a manufacturer and you're used to being told your content has to be really technical, right? You've got to get to the tech specs. You've got to get to the meat of it, which we know features and benefits aren't really what sells a product, right? It's results, but if you're a manufacturer, you're seeing that 90 second timeline and you're like, okay, I've got 12 features and benefits in my brochure and I just got initiatives for my leadership that we're now really going to position as innovative. So I need to make sure that I work that in. And then I've got 90 seconds to talk about how we're innovative and get these features and benefits out and then give them a call to action to email us for more information. Like that's completely overwhelming. That's what I would do if I was trying to lose business. If you want to lose business, that's the formula for you. But so from your perspective, Dennis, if I'm that person and I've got my script and I'm like, okay, I just heard Dennis say, don't do what I'm about to do. How do I know that I'm breaking it down in the right way? What are you doing to move from the information age for the content that you create into the organization of information? How do you know you're organizing it in a way that's going to resonate with your audience? You can overthink it, right? You can overthink it and think like, oh my gosh, I have to hit all these things. No, you definitely don't. You literally only have to hit one thing. And if that one thing gets the message across enough to sell your product or get the point across of what you're trying to make, that's all that matters. They don't need to know just because it's on that list of things that you want to get across. You don't have to, you know, get that to the audience. I would say write down what you're trying to say and just write it naturally. Like you're just going to send an email to your 10 year old and you're going to say, hey, this is what my company does. And you write it out and then you take away as many words as you possibly can in that little paragraph and see how tight you can get it. And then you can get creative on like the way that you can explain that in a video. And that's one process that I would do is, is kind of write it out. Like I did one today. I wrote out what I was trying to say, and then I fit in all the pieces of the video and all the same video that I have to make it somewhat compelling to watch. There's a great saying in, um, in copywriting that you spend twice the amount of time editing that you do writing, which is exactly what you're saying. You get it all out and then you basically just take it all off. I'd never heard that before. I guess I've never really dove into the copywriting world of it all, which I really need to, but that makes all the sense. I spend so much time working on those titles and the hooks because I want it to be captivating without being too spammy and salesy, you know, it's a fine line. That is it. That is a heck of a dance. It's a total dance. Yeah, it is. I think what do they call it like Buzzfeed? So that was where I first saw that was when you're looking for hooks, you can look up Buzzfeed headlines. They're a little bit too far on one side, but it gives you an idea of yeah, yeah, totally headlines that are going to make you want to click and watch. I went to IBS and when I was there, I was blown away at all the vendors who were there because I see the homeowner side of the house and I see all the homeowners that are like, Hey, tell me all the cool products that I can have on my house. What are the options? What can what can I do here? And then I go there and I see all the vendors are like, please tell the homeowners about everything that we offer. And I'm like, man, you guys just need to meet each other. That's the only problem we're running into. Yeah, so yeah, I'm so glad we're doing this podcast because I just want to yell at all the companies out there like, do better at content and your customers are excited to see what you have to offer. Just don't bore them to death. Anything stick out in specific of like, Hey, if you want to target a homeowner, you need to do this or anything that you saw where you saw someone trying to target a homeowner. I had I have a whole bunch of stories and videos. I was being polite, but like calling out manufacturers whose booths don't make sense. So you're amongst friends. The yeah, not I commend anyone. You don't you also don't have to name names, right? Like you also don't have to name names. We're not here to make anybody look bad. Yeah, no, and I would never, never, ever do that. I just I do see some of the common mistakes of like you said, listing everything. If you take the take your product or any product and read the side of the box and make that into a video. That's wrong. Don't do that. So I mean, that's that's probably the biggest red flag ever. If you're just telling me what your products are made out of. Tell me your product's bulletproof, but don't tell me that it's made out of this certain material because I just doesn't relate to a homeowner. So I would say things like that. Okay, we need that. I just we need we got to pause. We got to pause the video. We just got to pause. I need all manufacturers to stop here and rewind because what Dennis just said is is key. And so I'm going to make him say it again. You just said something really important, which is like, don't tell me that it's polyurethane. Tell me that it's paintable and waterproof. Right. Like the benefits that the homeowner is going to tell me the benefits and the results are a lot of our listeners are going to be like, please do not bring homeowners to our website. And like we see you and and that's okay. If you're in the commercial space or don't want to target homeowners directly, that's fine. But for a lot of manufacturers who do want to target homeowners, where are they falling short in getting their message across that it's just either falling on deaf ears or not landing the way that it could? As you were saying that, I'm thinking that could be wrong here, but the bigger companies, the end result most of the time, I would think is going to be the homeowner, like it's going to end up on a homeowner's house. What I do is I'm talking to the homeowner, but it also affects the people who are making the product because now the homeowner goes to the builder and then says, I want this, and then the builder goes to his guy and goes to the manufacturer. And then now there's demand for that product. So I know, like you said, it doesn't apply everywhere, but I'm seeing that now more than ever where the builder doesn't have the time to explain and say, here's every single option that exists for your home. Well, they much rather would have the homeowner be like, Hey, is this an option? Can I add this to my house? And then the builder can say, yeah, your name, get educated more on the product, reach out to the company. And then that becomes, you know, another, another avenue for, for sales, I guess. That's a really interesting vantage point. So we've been talking for the last five years, really the last 10 years. It's no secret that more and more consumers are moving into a desire to educate themselves on products. And when I say consumers, I mean, everybody across the channel, we see the margin for where anybody in building materials channels, whether it's architects, designers, building builders, contractors, homeowners, they used to want to talk to someone a lot earlier in their decision-making process. And now most data shows they're somewhere between 85 to 95 percent of the way decided by the time they're ready to have a conversation with somebody at the manufacturing level. And what the assumption has been for a long time, though, is the, the weight of decision power on an installer or a builder on the homeowner's behalf is always like they're going to bring their top two to three brands for any given product category. And what I'm hearing you say is that's actually kind of shifted because of just all of the other responsibilities on the builder. And now the builder has moved into a level of comfort of when homeowners bring them something like they want homeowners to have a voice in the building process and to say, like, Hey, I just saw ICF, you know, lumber prices were up a lot. And so we saw a lot more ICF framing happening because lumber and ICF were suddenly pretty close in price. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So like they want homeowners to have that voice. Now, obviously we're talking about a specific type of home and track builders and production builders aren't necessarily part of that conversation, but they do still need to even hear from the homeowner end, right? Of like what's being asked for. They hear 10 homeowners saying that they want LP SmartSide. Guess what? Those production builders might move to LP SmartSide because everyone is just dying for this. So the demand really does come with the homeowner. And, and I was even thinking about this to where short form video can also be used to even as a big manufacturer, if you're selling a product that you're able to get your message across to where those short form videos become your new salesman. Because if you're hitting these key points where you find that perfect tagline that this is bulletproof, then people associate that with bulletproof. So then when you have the builder who's trying to sell it to the homeowner, he'll say, this is bulletproof or the building, the building supply store who's selling it to the builder, they can hit those key points. It's almost you have a virtual sales team going out through your videos. You're able to tell them the benefits of your product and then everyone all the way downstream will hear the benefits of your product and then relay them to everybody else. An amazing time really if you think about it. That's just unheard of to be able to do that. I totally agree. And the other thing is to not underestimate the speed that that adds to your sale cycle. So one of the big pain points for building materials is the amount of time between somebody being like, Hey, I'm interested in your product and somebody actually purchasing that product. It's a bit shorter and residential than it is commercial, obviously, but that lead time can be really long and anything you can do to make that faster, like educating the homeowner or and then making sure that the builder is going to have the same message that the homeowner saw in your videos. I mean, that's going to make huge decisions happen faster because one builders, like we just said, they've got more on their plate. They're more taxed than they used to be. So yes, maybe they're the tiebreaker for a couple of competing products, but they're not going to talk a homeowner out of a product that the homeowners interested in unless it's like egregious, right? So if a homeowner is like, Hey, I know you like these two. I saw content about this one or I saw that this one says it's bulletproof and that it doesn't fade in the sun and that I can replace one piece of siding in 10 years and it's all still get a color match. You know, even if the competition technically does all of those same things, if they want, that's exactly right. If they've seen it from product A, the builder isn't going to bother spending time, honestly, wasting time talking them out of product A because product B also does that. They're going to be like, great product A it is, let's move on. And then if they give them product B and they don't like it, they're going to be looking for reasons why they don't like product B the entire time it's installed versus they're going to find ways to make product A the one that they chose better. Even if it's falling off the wall, they're like, but it still looks better. You know, they're going to come up with all these reasons why. So it is. It isn't your best interest to go that route. That's 100 percent accurate. We all love to be right. Right. Yeah, for sure. And the other part where builder brigade comes in is one thing that we talk about for homeowners a lot is the just sheer overwhelming amount of decisions they have to make when building a home that no one thinks about until they're in the process because homeowners, they get into it and they're like, yeah, what's there to decide? Roof, siding, tile, backsplash, stove, sink, shower, done. Right. They wanted them. I only know this because I've talked to so many and then they're like, I'm sorry, what's flashing and why do I have to care about that? And I have to think about the transition between my windows and my outside. What like all of these questions that suddenly are your decision to make if you're going the route of building more custom or semi custom. So any alleviation you can give to that, which falls into education, but education that I can understand is going to get you leaps and bounds, even if it's within a hairs fraction of what your competition is doing, if you say it better or clearer or you're the only one who says it, I mean, that's just a clear in road for homeowners. When I was at IBS, there were so many insane products where there's not enough time in the day. If I could have it installed in a home, I know that I could get those videos viral because people want to see that. And there's just so many cool products that there's just not enough time in the day when you're there to like record everything. But for instance, if you're a door manufacturer, make Costco doors, because if you go online and you see Costco doors or all the viral videos come from Costco doors because it's almost like a new term. And if you don't know what a Costco, Costco door is, it's a small little door. It's like half door, maybe a little bit higher than your knee that leads from the garage into the pantry. So when you unload grew up your groceries, you just chuck them through the little door. Stop it, stop it. And yeah, that film is so good. And it made viral videos. And I get the question all the time, where do I get a Costco door? How many have a good recommendation to give people because it's a lot of times people are choosing like an attic door that they bring down down to the first floor to install. So that's a good opportunity for a door company. So you sell on the Costco door. Well, now what do you know, they end up getting all the doors through you because it just makes sense. Right. It's maybe they start to look at your other products and realize that you're a good fit. So it's solving. Oh my gosh. I have my brain just broke. I mean, you're literally talking about using social media, which so social media, it gets a bad rap because you're like, oh, it's Facebook. But like, you're literally talking about using consumer research. That's what that is. That's voice of customer feedback saying, hey, we want this. And then using that to build out a product roadmap. That's a tale as old as time. You're just using a different channel. That's a lot cheaper than because custom research. Yeah, it's more real. And you have the comments to back it up because that's another thing is it's real because if your product sucks, they're going to let you know in the comments. They if they don't like your face, they're going to let you know that too. So that is one part of social media that has its goods and bads. But a good product nine times out of ten is just going to do great in the comments and then it just ends up selling even more because everyone can agree. We don't have time to deal with crap right now. So is it good? Everyone agrees it's good. Boom. Let's buy it. Let's keep it moving. So speaking of your social media presence, one of the very cool things that if I if I were Dennis, I would think this is very cool is you sit at like a sideline view of relationships between homeowners and builders and homeowners and contractors and builders and installers and then how manufacturers kind of are intermixed in all of that. And you just get to kind of like naturally organically watch it happen. What are you seeing that builders and installers who are really winning with homeowners? What are they doing that others aren't doing? If they're winning with homeowners, I think they're just. Probably being the most transparent, I would say, which that's a really cool visual that you just explained by the way, like being in the center of everything because that is what I'm trying to do is just be like the conduit for everyone to just kind of talk and communicate. I guess the builders and homeowner relationship, it's probably transparency. And I think social media is a great way to open that door of transparency. Everyone just wants real and they want someone to answer their questions and answer the phone and answer the phone transparency and availability. Yeah. And and and I and I say that coming from a place that I am on the builder's side because I think building a house is the most insane thing and it's hard to believe that it even comes together. If you stand in the middle of a house that just got built and you look around, you're like every single thing here had to be planned, coordinated, organized, weather had to come in, market prices, banks. It's just all this together for a builder to do. They don't get paid enough, man. It's really it's it's a it's it's insane. It's crazy when you really think about it in that way. But unfortunately, you also see the bad side of it to where there's so much going on and for them to keep their head above water, they might have too much going on and it's hard to manage it all to where you see some of these horror stories like I have a Facebook group that really opened up my eyes to all of this, where you're seeing some horror stories of new construction builds and things kind of falling apart and and that's scary as well. So just communication seems to be the biggest issue that I'm seeing from from the outside looking at. So for our listeners, Dennis, I think it's how you got builder brigade started. You said or like it's how it evolved, and it's it's how we came across it, which is he took all of the questions and everything that you've learned and you put it into this PDF full transparency. I haven't looked at your PDF. So I'm making I'm making assumptions, but I've heard rumors from like multiple sources. When we first connected, I like five people reach out to me and they're like, oh, my gosh, we love his content like his content is so, so good. Like people on my team talking about how they've been following you for ages and like we'd never talked about it. I know. So Dennis took all of the questions because he knew homeowners have the questions. He built a home. He had the questions and you put it into a PDF. Is that right? Yeah. So I just put everything into a checklist. So I was in the army before all this and I was just always into just simplification, SOPs. It all just made sense to me to just have it written down very simple to the point. And that's what the checklist is. It's just everything to just let it hit your brain and let you think about it. And then you can either make a decision. It's now evolved into just a massive selection sheet with tips thrown in there. So that's why it's like called ultimate is I tried to just put everything all in there to where you don't have to watch every single one of my videos. It's right in that checklist. So I didn't tell Dennis that I was going to do this. This is not a plug. This is not a sponsored podcast, but I'm just going to give you like a hot tip. If I were a manufacturer who wanted to target homeowners, I would go download Dennis's PDF and checklist and figure out what are the questions homeowners have about my product category and then create content for my products around those questions. That is sitting gold, you guys. Again, it's not sponsored. You don't have to do it. But if I had a checklist readily available to tell me what manufacturers wanted to know about agencies, I would pay someone for that checklist and I would make a dent about it. Right. Like you had this is voice of customer data. I would totally do that. I think that is like that's like shooting fish in a barrel, in my opinion. That's awesome. Any time we can help manufacturers get their message across, I mean, that's that's what we live and breathe for. Like I want manufacturers to be successful because they have customers who actually want to buy their product and feel good about buying it. Like the building materials industry from like a marketing and sales perspective, in my opinion, is different than the vast majority of other industries with sales and marketing because we're not just like hawking, you know, consumerism and like buy and buy and more and more. It's like truly the best products should win. The best companies should win. The best innovations should win. It's not but the only way that happens is through sales and marketing. And so anytime we get in front of something that I'm like this feels like a really good tool. I want to promote that. Like I just want manufacturers to win. Dennis, I want to say thank you so much for your time. We could talk forever. If I could get just like one nugget from you before you go. If you were a manufacturer who wanted to reach a homeowner, what's one thing you would do to see success? Would definitely be short form content. I would go hard on 10 videos, watch some other videos in your industry, see what they're doing. Not necessarily replicate them, but see what works and what doesn't work. And I would lean towards showing behind the scenes. So maybe going and seeing how the sausage is made like in the back, right? So maybe show what's going on back there and how things are made because people like to see the other side of it instead of the suit and tie guy saying all the benefits of the product. I would kind of focus my video on that. That's killer. If any of our listeners want to reach out or get in touch, what's a good way for them to do that? Just shoot me an email at contact at builder brigade dot com. Awesome. We will link to that in the show notes. Thank you again for your time. This was a great conversation for our listeners. If you want more great content like this, head to venbio.com slash podcast to subscribe. Until next time, I'm Beth Papnikolov.