Flag Planting for Sales and Video Marketing

Flag planting is an extremely effective way to accomplish your sales and video marketing goals. Better yet, you can leverage this strategy even if you are new to video sales and marketing. The benefits are stark, whether you are new to sales and video marketing work or have been a sales or marketing leader for some time.  

But let’s back up. Before we get into flag planting and how it can help you, I want to ask you a few questions about your sales and marketing work. Specifically, are you frustrated that you aren’t getting the sales growth that your sales team deserves to get? Are you getting too many phone calls, emails, SMS messages, and persistent Zoom fatigue? Are you finding that your audience, prospects, or customers are forgetting about the value of your business, even if your product or service creates massive value? 

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, you are definitely in the right place. For as rewarding as our sales and marketing work can be, it can be frustrating when we fall short of our goals. Moreover, the constant pressures and work involved can make it feel like we can’t get our heads above water. It can sometimes be overwhelming, making it even more frustrating when we aren’t hitting those sales and marketing objectives that we are striving towards. 

Because of this, we are excited to share this episode of RevShow. All of us at Dubb are extremely excited to teach you how to make your sales efforts scalable and repeatable through flag planting. Flag planting is an effective and efficient way to build better relationships with your prospects and generate more sales. The magic comes from simply recording multiple clips from your webcam, phone, or screen, and then uploading the entire video to YouTube, a podcast, directory, or another type of digital real estate. 

While this is a quick tutorial, it can provide massive value to you, your colleagues, and your business. Flag planting can be a fantastic way to supercharge your business, so long as you put in the work and commit to the process. Let’s jump into it. 

This blog post is a summary of a recent discussion on RevShow, which is our YouTube show on sales, marketing, and everything in between. To see the full discussion, click on the video link above. If you would like to see more content like this, feel free to subscribe to RevShow’s channel here.

What is Flag Planting?

To get started, let’s talk about what flag planting is. Essentially, flag planting is about brand impressions and content assets that exist out there in the world. By understanding your brand and consuming your content, customers can gain and learn information about you and your business. 

Importantly, these brand mentions and content assets typically exist on third party channels. These third party channels include other people’s websites, YouTube, directories, press releases, and more. The idea here is to create assets and distribute them across the digital landscape. The great news is that once you do this, your assets are constantly doing work for you. Even when you are sleeping, your videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, and more are advocating for your product, service, and business. 

Flag planting is a fantastic way to get you and your message out into the world. There are three extremely important benefits that you will find here. 

First, flag planting is sustainable. This means that the content that you release out into the world keeps working for you. Below, I am going to discuss this phenomenon by sharing the distinction between lighting firecrackers and planting flags. In the meantime, you can think of flag planting as a way of cloning yourself. What you are effectively doing is adding value to the world 24/7/365. You never know who is going to come across one of your flags. In the best scenarios, it may be that a whale of a customer discovers one of your pieces of content and immediately clicks the “buy” button. Even if a viewer or prospect doesn’t immediately make a purchase, the flag planting strategy helps you build awareness and a real, genuine relationship with that individual. In the long run, this dramatically increases your chances of moving that individual past the finish line and making a sale. 

Second, it is impactful. Flag planting makes you and your company stand out. By adding value to every single piece of content, you remain in the minds of all of your viewers. You immediately impact their lives by giving them some type of information (or even entertainment). But going beyond that, the reputational impact is long-lasting. Even if your audience decides not to purchase your product or service right now, you and your company will remain in their minds. Now, that is power. 

Finally, it is profitable. Simply put, the flag planting method can increase your sales rate and help you reach your sales goals. In doing so, you will find that flag planting is a more effective way of increasing your revenue and overall profits. Rather than open up your phone book and make countless numbers of cold calls, you can create persistent pieces of content and let them do the heavy lifting for you. They can vet cold prospects and even make sales for you. Even though there is an upfront cost in creating content and distributing it to various platforms, that upfront investment can lead to substantial profits down the road. 

Lighting Firecrackers vs. Planting Flags

As you can see, flag planting is a fantastic way to build stronger relationships with your audience, make your sales and marketing work more efficient, and generate more sales. 

At its core, flag planting represents a stark contrast to sales and marketing techniques that started decades ago. When you go back to the manual methods and techniques in sales, you can quickly see that there is a ton of unnecessary work. You are manually sending out emails and responding to each and every phone call. Yes, you may be able to get some sales from these tactics. They haven’t permanently disappeared for a reason. At the same time, there are clear flaws here and flag planting directly addresses them. 

By embracing these old-school methods, what happens is that you are doing all of this work and getting a false sense of moving forward in sales. If you really think about it, it is like a firecracker. When you light a firecracker, you see sparks firing in the air. You think you are making progress, but you actually are not. To use another analogy, it is like getting a sugar high in selling. You think you are doing well and then it immediately comes right back down. It isn’t sustainable and it isn’t impactful—even if that initial sugar high is extremely addicting. 

Think about it: if you are having sales calls, are meeting people on Zoom, or responding to messages, you are not planting flags. You are lighting firecrackers. As we all know, firecrackers light up for a second and then they disappear. Extreme excitement leads to sustained disappointment. 

The key here is to plant your flag so that you can get more brand impressions (and ultimately more conversions). Even if you aren’t getting that initial sugar high or firecracker effect, the long-term effects are much more compelling. What you can get is a steady stream of prospects (even sales) from pre-vetted prospects. Ultimately, deferred gratification is the name of the game here. Flag planting is a slow, long-term strategy. You need to be patient to see all of its powerful effects, so keep this in mind as you are executing this strategy. 

Distinguishing Scale and Growth

Now, let’s get into something really important. This is a core component of flag planting and something that you’ll want to remember throughout the process. Specifically, we are going to distinguish the definitions of scale and growth. Understanding the difference between these two ideas will help you get the most out of the flag planting strategy. 

Let’s start with scale. Scale is where you increase your output without having to increase your inputs. That means you can increase your sales without needing to hire more people for sales and marketing. As you can imagine, this is extremely powerful. What this means is that you can supercharge your sales revenue without needing to dramatically increase your expenses. All of this naturally flows to your bottom line, which makes your company or organization more profitable. 

Growth, on the other hand, is where you need to increase the number of inputs in order to increase the number of outputs. It is the opposite side of scale because your expenses are rising with your revenue. While that rise may be in lockstep with your growth rate, the simple fact of the matter is that growth doesn’t come without a cost. 

As you can see, the difference is that growth costs a significant amount of money. Scaling, however, costs the same amount of money. We want scale, not growth, and flag planting lets you take advantage of the best parts of scaling. You get to increase the number of sales while maintaining the same type of inputs in generating fewer sales. In other words, it is a way to efficiently reach your sales and profitability goals. 

Leveraging the Baader-Meinhof Principle

There’s also something really interesting when it comes to flag planting. It has something to do with the Baader–Meinhof principle. While it may sound complicated, it is an easy-to-understand phenomenon that you can leverage through the flag planting strategy. 

The Baader–Meinhof principle involves the frequency illusion. You have probably heard of this before. If you buy a white Tesla vehicle and start driving around, for instance, you suddenly start to see more white Teslas. This is a cognitive bias at play. There aren’t actually more white Tesla vehicles on the road since you bought one of your own. Rather, you just think that there are more on the road because you yourself have a white Tesla. 

Now, here is the power of the Baader-Meinhof principle and how you can apply it to your sales growth. What is amazing about flag planting is that you are planting your brand in different places. You are deploying assets, content pieces, videos, and articles all over the place. When someone comes across these assets, they can start to consume them as they surf the web. The key here is that they will start to think that your brand is everywhere. But in reality, it is a cognitive illusion. It is the Baader-Meinhof principle at work.

The great news is that you don’t need to understand the Baader-Meinhof principle in detail. You don’t need to become an expert or know why it exists. By following the flag planting strategy and creating valuable content for your audience, you can take advantage of everything that the Baader-Meinhof principle has to offer. Your audience will naturally think that you, your product or service, and your company are larger than you may really be. That added credibility can go a long way in helping you generate more sales and grow your bottom line.   

Implementing Flag Planting: Some Tips and Tricks

At this point, you understand flag planting is a method that is super effective. You can also see that firecracker methods like sending out SMS messages and doing other manual things can lead to a sugar high. We have also explained how there is a huge difference between scale and growth. Because of this, you have the necessary knowledge of flag planting and how it can help you supercharge your business. 

But how do you actually do this in practice? To put it another way, what can you do starting right now to leverage all of these ideas and insights?  

You’re in luck. I want to share a burst of ideas that you can start to implement today. To be clear, these are just a few introductory ideas. Once you start implementing flag planting, I’m sure you will come up with other ways to get the most out of this strategy. 

One of the first things you can do is create valuable content. This is a must for any type of video sales and marketing strategy, but it is especially important if you want to leverage flag planting. So how do you create valuable content? For starters, get inside the minds of your target audience. The best way to do this is by talking to them and seeing the problems or issues that they are facing in their lives. Once you have a good understanding, make video content that speaks to those problems. There is a bit of art and science here, but the bottom line is that you need to have a laser-like focus on creating valuable content for your viewers and readers. 

Once you have done this, you will want to take your valuable content and share it with the rest of the world. The natural question is where you want to store and house that valuable content. While there are no hard and fast rules here, there are several places that you will want to target. 

For starters, try to get into directories. These can be paid and free directories. Directories are powerful because they let you take advantage of the scale and breadth of a specific platform. Even if you don’t have a large audience going into flag planting, you can find some new followers and fans on these directories. Most of them are completely free, so it is definitely in your interest to start posting your content there. 

Beyond directories, make sure that you are leveraging blogs. If you work for a larger company, try to get your content on your company blog. And if your company does not have a blog, take advantage of publishing platforms like Medium or LinkedIn. You can even create a personal or company-wide Substack page and start publishing content there. While blogs aren’t the newest form of digital communication, they are still extremely effective ways of delivering your message to a specific audience. You’re currently reading one, right?

If you have video content (which we highly recommend), get it on YouTube. As you probably know, YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the planet. The amount of views and engagement on YouTube is ridiculously high, so any person or company creating video content will want to be there. As for the distribution itself, you can post your video content on your channel or a third-party channel that you sponsor. Remember: if you sponsor a YouTube video and it goes viral, your flag stays in that video. It doesn’t get stripped away like a traditional advertisement. That is extremely powerful and something that you should keep in mind as you are planning out your YouTube strategy. No matter which direction you choose, make sure you are posting your videos on YouTube. You won’t regret it. 

Another idea is getting involved with podcasts. This is true whether you are creating your own podcast or appearing on others. If you are creating your own podcast, there are several things that you will want to keep in mind. First, make sure that you stick with a consistent production schedule. Whether you are releasing content every week, every other week, or through some other cadence, your audience will expect consistency here. As for your show format, it is entirely up to you. You can create a five-minute podcast talking about your reactions to recent industry news or an hour-long podcast that interviews fascinating people in your sector. Whatever it is, don’t forget to deliver value to your audience. 

Besides creating your own podcast, don’t be afraid to get onto people’s podcasts. Those podcasts can be used over and over again as a sales asset. Even if it is just one interview, you may find that that interview leads to several sales in the future. If you get invited to appear on someone else’s podcast, you should generally say yes. Also, consider pitching yourself to appear on others’ podcasts. You will want to be careful with this, but you may find situations where you can get on a great podcast by simply asking. Be confident and pitch yourself to the best of your ability. 

Finally, let’s not forget about the general press. Public relations is a big part of this. If you can get articles published in publications, you’ll discover that they are some of the best flags possible. It will certainly take some work—especially if you or your company haven’t been featured in the press before. However, that doesn’t mean that it is impossible. Like podcasts, you can try pitching yourself to journalists. While the success rate may be lower than you would like, all it takes is one story to get started. Then, when pitching yourself, you can reference the fact that you have already been published, which can increase your chances of being published with this next publication. This may take some time, but if you are successful in courting the general press, you will be planting extremely powerful flags that will help you for years. 

With these methods of planting flags, what you are actually doing is planting seeds. Even though you don’t really know how things are going to turn out, you are putting yourself out into the universe. You are leveraging serendipity in your favor. It’s actually kind of exciting. Any day or time, you could have an individual contact your business and want to become a paying customer. Flag planting is that powerful. 

The Powerful Effects of Flag Planting

So what is the effect of all of this? To put it another way, what are the most prominent benefits that you will see by adopting a flat planting strategy?

I think there are really three things that we get from flag planting. While these aren’t the only three benefits of this strategy, I think that these are the starkest as you are getting started. 

Number one is the idea that you can expand your brand. By following a flag planting strategy, you are forced to put your assets out into the world. Doing so, you create more places where people can discover you and your company. While it may take some time, creating valuable content and sharing it with others can elevate your business. When a prospect is looking for a product or service to solve a longstanding problem in their life, they will be more likely to think of your company. Building a brand is an ongoing endeavor, so you will need to constantly invest in new content and plant flags around the digital world. If you do this, however, you will notice that your brand becomes much more powerful in your sector or industry. 

Secondly, you get to shift from customer service to customer experience. Think about it. When you go into a Starbucks, the customer experience is so much more important than the customer service. Customer service is transactional and occurs when there are problems. On the other hand, the customer experience happens when people pay money or they are about to pay money. Ultimately, transforming a customer service into a customer experience is even more powerful, and flag planting can help you with this process. Flag planting epitomizes the customer experience because you are directly tying valuable content with sales. By creating awesome content and using a tool like Dubb to include call to action buttons below your videos, you get to create an experience that is vastly different from your competitors. While other businesses in your sector may be prioritizing customer service, your focus on customer experience through flag planting will separate you from the pack.  

The third thing is this idea of framing your prospects. If they initially see your flag and mentions of your company, they come pre-framed. This means that they are ready to buy your product or service. Through flag planting, you can set their expectations and bring them one step closer to making a purchase. What is also really neat about this is that they get the feeling of what it is like to work with you. They can understand what type of person you are. All of this is scalable and repeatable, meaning that you can continue framing prospects and customers as you are executing this strategy. It is a fantastic way to build stronger relationships and generate more sales. 

Get Started with Flag Planting Today

Flag planting can be the best-performing sales and marketing strategy in your portfolio. It is that powerful. From the smallest startups to the world’s largest corporations, everyone can benefit from creating valuable content and sharing that content with millions of people on the web. All it takes is for you to make the decision and get started right now. 

Hopefully, you are seeing the power of creating brand flags. Along with this, I hope that you are inspired to create a video using Dubb and upload it to your YouTube channel. Dubb can be a fantastic resource, whether you are looking for an easier way to create video content or a more seamless way of getting your content in front of your audiences. Whether you choose to use Dubb or not, make sure that you plant your flag today!

If you liked this video and blog post, consider sharing it with a friend, sales leader, marketing leader, or someone else who could use the inspiration. Along with this, feel free to contact us if you have any questions about Dubb. You can also click here for a free 14-day trial of our premium plans.