Interview One Peak Creative

0:00 I'm sure you have seen his ads popping up everywhere here are three steps to a slam dunk visual hook that got me views like this with over 75,000 students enrolled in their current Tik Tok and real Creator course one p creative has absolutely been dominating the online ad game and it's a huge thing for me to say because I don't say that often their approach Blends education with entertainment making their ads both informative and super engaging and fun to watch it's time to get out of your living room a truly unique ass strategy in today's ad vertising landscape if you ask me in today's episode I'm thrilled to welcome one PE creatives co-founder mag Jackson to dive in into your secret behind your success and I was like it's January by my birthday June 2nd so 6 months I am going to grow to 100,000

0:47 followers on Tik Tok can we approach this completely differently can we so buckle up and let's get started the future of marketing is going Omni Channel really nice to have you on the OM Channel podcast how are you I'm great thank you so much for having me I'm very excited to chat with you today I think this is going to be really fun yes for sure so the reason why I have reached out to you and invited you to the podcast was because I was scrolling on Instagram hual story and I came across one of your ads and I didn't even care what you guys were selling but I'm like I'm just going to follow this account because the ad is so much fun and it's just so engaging that I'm just

1:34 creatively geeking out over the accounts I'm just going to follow it anyway I don't care just I want to see these ads so that's how I felt so tell me about WP creative your the Genesis of the company I just want to learn more about this whole yes definitely oh my gosh well first of all thank you that that's such kind words um yeah we have a lot of fun with our ad strategy for sure so I really appreciate um you Tak Tak notice and and enjoying them um so a little bit a little bit about one Peak so um I'm one of the founders of one Peak and we are a online education hub for Content creators um marketers small business owners who are looking to improve their video strategy um we launched our first online course in September 2023 the Tik

2:20 Tok and reals Creator course and we've quickly grown it to almost 75,000 students um in the past year which is which is crazy we've seen a lot of growth but that's not where um one Peak started we've definitely gone through a few evolutions of our business um my husband and I founded the company back in 2015 and at the time we were B we were both marketers so we started one Peak as a um marketing agency doing everything from social media management graphic design website building um and slowly started kind of Dipping our toes into the photography space and it wasn't until 2019 that um we decided decided to kind of go all in on video production we brought on our part now business partner

3:06 Connor um at that time and we went um and pivoted into a video production agency and so when we were first starting out um in the video space we were working with a lot of um local small business owners helping them with their video strategy but then very quickly grew to working with national Brands like Expedia Fairmont hotels um Doritos PepsiCo um doing National brand campaigns not just for social media but also for um TV broadcast um and so yeah we ran started that in 2019 ran that until um 2023 um we ended up the reason we pivoted into the online education space is we were just burning ourselves out like we were on set um doing like three to four Productions a week on set for 10 to 12 hours a day it was

3:53 exhausting exchanging our time for money and so we wanted to find a way to package our expertise piece in the video space and see if there was a way that we could reach a broader audience to share what we had learned not only in the video space but in the content creation space which we had seen was absolutely exploding so yeah that's kind of the long- winded answer but that's one Peak and um yeah that's who we are today I love the long winded answers and can you tell me why the name one Peak came to mind was that your original name with the marketing agency or yes so we've kept the name the same name through our entire Journey um a big a big piece of that is um my husband and I just love the outdoors where we did a lot of like

4:39 backpacking and stuff um when we um were first kind of like starting the business and so um yeah that's kind of where the name came to be I feel like there's always one of our little like taglines is find your Peak like there's always um a new threshold a new Mountain you can cross whether that's in business or whether that's as a Creator so felt like felt like a good name so your background is in marketing right and then yes how was that process for you to pivoting into photography space and then to video creation H it's I feel like anytime you pivot it's it's very scary for sure um especially when it's a skill that maybe you haven't fully mastered yet but I think as entrepreneurs we just I don't know if I can speak for everyone but for myself like when I have a poll to go towards

5:25 something I've always been under the um I kind of have this philosophy that if you just jump both feet in you'll figure it out and so um that's kind of what we've done every step of the way of the business is if the business wasn't lighting us up anymore at any stage it's like okay where can we jump next to really enjoy what we're doing every day so yeah yeah I love that and thank you so much for sharing all of that so um I want to go and kind of talk about the creative process because I don't know if you have studied some of the like what's been out there like advertisement wise specifically but I do find the way that you guys are creating those videos and ads to be outstandingly good you know

6:11 it's not like a boring ad that you see on TV or even on the internet but it's it's outstandingly good so what was yourp what was your inspiration behind that and what how did you get into the point where it's just it's so creative it's so engaging like what was that process oh well thank you um it's funny that's not where we started when it came to advertising for shares so when we launched our course um the first thing we did is look at what everybody else was doing in the online education space and a lot of people and there's still tons of people doing it today were sitting behind a desk just telling you about their product and how it was going to change your life and so when we first started that's exactly what we did we thought hey all these amazing people that we look up to that's how they're marketing themselves that must be

6:57 working that's what that's what we're going to take a swing had it with and so um that didn't perform great to be honest it it it didn't work as well as we thought it would and so we thought okay let's take a step back here can we approach this completely differently can we instead of trying to like educate people and jam facts down their throats about our product instead can we just entertain them and let learning be something that's kind of happening almost sub subconsciously while they're watching and so that's kind of where we've taken our B strategy is always coming at it from the perspective of first we want to entertain people next we want to provide them some really um impactful value and then we want that cell to just be so soft where it's

7:43 they're they're buying into us as humans and and relating to who we are and and to where our students are at when we're bringing like case studies and stuff into the mix but then yeah just really trying to make it approachable fun make people laugh you know keep it entertaining instead of just trying to to sell them right off the bat or or to jam information um in their face because that that doesn't work at the end of the day you know um there's a concept called infotainment and I think I don't know I don't know I think I don't know if you know Jump Card they're an LA based company and they also like talk about like infotainment when you mix entertainment with information and just like nice mix right yeah so we call it edutainment over here education and entertainment same thing yeah exactly

8:29 same concept but we teach that a lot in our courses for sure so yeah we call it edutainment and um that's really like the winning mix but I think it's always leading with entertainment so who is The Mastermind behind those random like even the script is so random but like the clip like who who is behind like the fish like the fish tank and like that is like who who's doing that oh my goodness I like to think that Glen Connor and myself are very collaborative in the creative process we all definitely have our strengths more so like approaching it where it's like instead of being like we need to follow this like a toz Playbook how can we just

9:14 keep people engaged entertained throughout and what visuals could we bring in and then how can we build the script around that later so it's almost thinking about like what could we visually put on the screen that's going to pull people in and how can we build our script around that um we find when we take that approach um it works really really well for us so it's always the visuals first and then you think about what the script is going to be like yeah and and sometimes we do it the opposite way but I find that um thinking about like what can is visually going to stimulate people and then how can we yeah build the script kind of around that so the Uber story for example when you were in the car um like those that that came first and then you built the script around that as well m

10:00 it's it's hard those see those that kind of ad is a little bit that is kind of more of like an ad um like brand piece format whereas the ones that we do for our course are very different so that one we would have built the script out first I feel like I'm really confusing your audience here but it's kind of different when it comes to like creating like a uh that was more of like a brand ad whereas like when we're creating like an edutainment style ad for our products I find that we like to think about like what does the audience want to see and then how can we go from there it's really exciting we're actually going to be launching um a brand new course in Jan in January called the video ads Academy where we're going to be taking people through exactly how we create our ads and what that looks like so I'm really excited for that that's very exciting what is your favorite ad that

10:46 you've ever done whether it's on the infotainment side or whether it's on sorry edutainment side or whether it's on the just for one Peak is there anything un specific that you feel like that was so much fun to make that's a tough one I feel like honestly anything that we're creating um for our courses right now is really lighting me up because we have complete creative control since it's our product that we're marketing um I find it's just like the shoot days are just so fun like we're literally laughing so hard like you bring up the fish bowl like I literally take a fish bowl full of water and like fling it at the camera my husband got like drenched in that moment like we we keep it really fun and we keep it really light-hearted so I feel like any of those ads where we have full

11:32 creative control um I'm really enjoying making how long does it take to shoot like a one minute ad o depends on the it totally it totally depends on like contextually what's happening in the ad it ranges for sure um but we like to try and and this might be a little bit crazy but we like to try to try to shoot everything um in a day if we can so we'll typically we start in the morning and try to wrap by the afternoon um and we make we we choose our locations um very strategically so we can try to accomplish it in that and yeah we find that works really well for us we're we're typically putting new ads in Market every couple of weeks so we have like a quite a quite a quick Cadence

12:19 there so we want to proide provide as much value in entertainment as we can but also not be like spending a week producing an ad we'd like to try to do it as as quickly as possible but as effective as possible I love that thank you so much for sharing that so I wanted to ask you about um so here's one thing I noticed about your company and your brand specifically is that you actually embody what you teach so you're not just like selling the course but you have your own Instagram you know you have your Tik tok's account like you all of you individually have your own accounts that you are creating content for yes so that is so unique to me that when you embodying your teachings and we can

13:04 check the numbers that are behind you it's not just but you're making up yeah yeah it's definitely was intentional where it's like if we're going to be teaching people how to make organic content and eventually teaching people how to create ads that convert we need to have proof in the pudding we need to practice what we preach creating an organic strategy for ourselves to like prove that we knew what we were talking about was definitely intentional um I remember when we were starting to build out the framework for the course I set a goal for myself where I had never posted a personal Tik Tok before like I had we' helped our clients and stuff with videos but I'd never done it myself I'd had Instagram for forever but Tik Tok just wasn't something personally I had done so I set a goal for myself where I was like I think it was January and I was like it's January by my

13:50 birthday June 2nd so 6 months I am going to grow to 100,000 followers on Tik Tok I don't know how I'm going to do it I've never done that before um personally but I'm going to to try and so that's using everything we teach in the course I'm going to follow the framework to a te and see if I can do that and I think it was by like the second week of May I had passed 100,000 followers and I had I think I had accumulated almost like 80 80 million views which is crazy and I think by my birthday I was at like 15,000 or something and so I could say hey even if you're starting from Ground Zero on a brand new account this can work and so um yeah that was a really

14:35 and and at the same time Connor my business partner was doing the same thing on his Golf Channel and I think he grew his to like 50,000 or something was getting millions of views like we were really it was really important to us to be able to practice what we preach because yes we had helped our clients do this but personally for people that were creators that we wanted to take our course we wanted to make sure that they could really like look look at what we were doing and and be inspired by that so yeah yeah that was definitely very intentional and you know what I want to add to this is that you didn't just create a Tik Tok and did a random thing you actually built it around who you are right so it's it's not just like you doing like throwing things to the wall and like getting like attention that is like a weird attention like you see those kids doing right or dancing like

15:22 it's more like Megan in its entirety like how can I build that and you know right mhm exactly it was really intentional I wanted to share like Glenn and I's Crazy Life as parents and like who we are as people and hope that um other people that whether they're parents or not were just inspired by our like relationship really is what it came down to we kind of were in the like couple Niche which is like a very interesting Niche if you haven't like gone down that rabbit hole on on Tik Tok or Instagram it's it's really cool to like I just love being able to like have a little behind the scenes look into people's lives and I feel like even if I don't know personally or have any connection like if they can entertain me and um they are providing me some sort of value in our case it was in the Val the value of the our videos was like

16:08 you're going to you're going to laugh you're going to have fun you're going to see a funny reaction or or um see a challenge that we do with each other and so um yeah our goal was just to be able to entertain people and to bring a little bit of laughter into their lives and um it ended up working really well for us so um yeah we do definitely try um to create as much content as we can um because I think it's important to be able to also learn as well like to be continuously learning continuously pushing ourselves seeing what works what doesn't I think it's really important to um especially if this is what we're teaching in the space to kind of stay on top of it and keep ourselves fresh I want to go a little bit behind the business if you don't mind sharing um are you running your own ads like is it something that you do or do you have

16:53 someone an agency that you work with that are doing all those things for you yeah so um I'll share a little bit of our ad Journey um so when we were launching the course last September September 2023 we first started um a bit before that experimenting running our own ads so prior to this we hadn't spent a dollar on marketing our marketing business or a video production agency so the thought of like dumping money into ads was was kind of scary it was like H is this going to work is it not going to work will it pan out and so when we first started um where our expertise shines is on the actual like ad creative side of things we had never run an ad before in our lives before launching this education company and so we started

17:39 by like spending $50 there $100 here oh maybe we'd get a course sale but then the next day it wouldn't do so great so we were like very um emotional advertisers where we would have like a laser vision on the numbers and be kind of like pulling the triggers of like turning ads on and off based on that and so we realized very quickly that we were not ad Specialists and we needed a little bit of help so um we had a friend locally who had run a um media buying agency and we asked if he would if he would help us out and I remember oh my gosh I remember sitting down at our first coffee meeting with meeting with him and him um looking at looking at our product looking at um our numbers looking at all the things and and kind of taking a step back and going yep you

18:24 know I think I could scale this for you guys to spend like $10,000 a day on ads and I think I almost barfed I was like sorry what $10,000 a day that's Insanity like we just like dipped our toes and he's like no I think I I think I could scale this thing you have a product that is really marketable to such a wide range of people whether they're creators small business owners or marketers I think we can scale this thing and so that's exactly what what he helped us do is is slowly started increasing that ad spend and we kept pumping out really great creative um and now we're spending upwards of like $25,000 a day on ads which is crazy and right now you're feeling like really good about it it's you getting youri yeah exactly and like one thing he taught us is like all you need to do is be able to turn $1 into

19:10 two like if you can just simplify it that much to be like that's all I need to be able to do um then you're profitable so I think having that perspective shift too was really big in the beginning um and yeah it's been a really crazy fun Journey for sure love that uh you know I purchased one of your courses because of the ads and I was like I'm going to interview you so I might as well do my market research buy the product so when I was on the page I'm like hm okay let's buy this and then oh some upsells here and there and then next page some upsells here and there and then I'm like hm I really need to have some self-control here because I'm going to but I love how that's intentionally built up to like oh you might need this too and that and so is that also um the Ad Agency that has been

19:58 putting all that together or is it to you guys so we've we've done all of that kind of like backend stuff like we're doing all of that inhouse um we definitely like have brainstorm sessions and stuff with um our media buyer to kind of like test new things everything is AB tested so all of our landing pages are AB tested what upsells we include in the sequence like everything so we've kind of narrowed it down to a formula that works really well and then when we go to introduce a new product into our product Suite like for example the video ads Academy and January then that as well will be um AB tested on how we're going to position that and the type of upsells order bumps and stuff that we'll include so again that we were so new to the space like we knew nothing I think when we first launched we had no order bump we had no upsells it was like

20:44 here's the course hope you like it so now we've grown it to more of a little bit more robust strategy where we have a lot more products that we can offer our students and help them in specific areas so for example like we noticed a lot of people were really struggling with their hooks so it's like hey we can build a mini course all about just like perfecting that first 3 to 5 Seconds of your videos so we created the art of hooks course or we had students reaching out being like this is all great but like I'm just really not confident showing up on camera so we created a course called comfy on cam to help people like get over that like mental block of like getting in front of the camera and and sharing their stories so we kind of tuned to our turn to our community a lot to be like what is it that you need and can we create products um that can help support you no matter

21:30 what stage of your content Journey that you're in and I think you're doing it the right way because you're listening to clients demand customers feedbacks and you're building on that instead of experimenting with something that you don't even know if they want to right totally yeah I love that and um what do you think and just I want to go a little bit on the your students and like what are the things that you're seeing in the space obviously having contact with them and creating courses for their demands so what do you think as a creator that are just starting out in the space wanting to do reals and then monetizing them for a living what are the biggest mistakes that you see that o people make

22:17 in creating their first shorts and DRS yes I'm I say oof because there's a lot of things kind of fluttering in my head right now but I would say the biggest mistake that I I see creators make is that lack of a strong hook at the beginning of their video it really is so important because the algorithm rates how well your video is going to do and and who it's going to push it further on to based on your watch time if people aren't making it pass the first 3 to 5 seconds then your watch time's going to tank and that means that um all the effort you put into creating this awesome piece of content is going to go down the toilet which sucks so we say really focus your time on perfecting that first 3 to 5 Seconds we actually say Focus you should be

23:02 focusing like 80% of your time of creating the piece of content should focus on that first um 3 to five seconds it's funny like if you go in the we have a private Facebook community that comes with our with our course and so people are always sharing videos in there getting feedback from other students it's a really cool like collaborative process um but when I'm schooling through there I do find that like the majority of the videos that are shared like they're good videos but it's the hook that lacking and I think a big misconception that people have around hooks is that you just need to deliver like a bold statement to camera and you're going to like blast off into viral land but unfortunately that's just not how it works so I'll share an example of of something from like my own experience where I found that I really

23:49 kind of like where it first kind of like hit home to me for me the power of a strong hook so a few years ago my husband and I um and our little one went on a um a trip to Tofino which is which is like a surf Town out here in in um BC where I'm from and um I had all this like beautiful footage from the vacation when I came home and I was so excited I'm like oh I'm going to post this really cool reel everyone's going to like see this beautiful place I went to I'm going to like put Stitch all these videos together have a nice voiceover it's going to be awesome so I posted the video crickets like got not a ton of viewership I was like oh this is odd I thought this was really great um but then what I realized is I didn't give people like people weren't making it P like you can actually go into your insights and see where people are dropping off in your video and I noticed

24:34 that after like the first 3 seconds people were out of there so it's like I wasn't giving them a reason to stick around to see all this awesome footage that I had so I decided to um take another whack at it and think about like how could I spark curiosity about this vacation and so one interesting thing that happened on the trip was that we found out that I think she was like a year and a half at the time our little one um was scared of sand so we had spent all of this money on this like extravagant vacation to this surf Town Beach town and we get to the beach and our daughter hates sand like awesome this is great um so I thought to start the video with my daughter has a phobia I've never heard of before and it absolutely ruined our beautiful vacation so right there just that change of

25:20 instead saying like come with me on my trip to Tofino instead using a hook that Sparks a bit more curiosity that video went on to get I think it's almost at like 2 million views so just that little difference of bringing in that Curiosity Factor makes just like a wild transformation and it can really happen overnight it's quite quick once you understand um being able to spark that Curiosity it'll totally transform your strategy and I love seeing students um have big like overnight wins like that I love that and how about your daughter does she like sand now is she okay she does yes she's good now she's just like obsessed with the beach we go all the time but yeah that was a tough pill to swallow cuz we like I remember I'm like oh I'm so excited for her to like take

26:06 her take her steps on the beach and this and that and I put her down and it was just like screaming I was oh no it was a long week for sure love that and um you said so we need to spark curiosity in the way we start our videos is there any other way we can start or is it always that we need to lead with curiosity is it like because you mention like shocking factors are like not the best to start yeah well there's it's interesting because there's a lot of different ways to spark curiosity it can be like visually what people are seeing on the screen do you have something that's kind of jarring that's coming up that they're like oh what's going on here can you include like a really compelling like text block hook that like shows like like States something that they might be interested to learn

26:51 more about later in the video can your actual caption of the video hint to something later um I'm kind of nerding out right now but there are a lot of ways that you can spark curiosity in your hook um we we actually call it like the five elements of a strong hook it's not just like the statement you say to camera there's actually like five different ways that like while a viewer is scrolling you can capture their attention which is really cool I love that and I think one of the um the main course that I purchased um there is an extra like hook PDF that is very helpful because you guys are actually giving like like an insertable sentences that I can just apply to my own stuff that is like so easy to just like you know Implement and the plug in my own stuff and I I'm I am running an own uh

27:39 marketing agency so I apply everything to my clients you know I'm like first let me check if this is working and to be honest with you like it does and I used some of the hooks in the description it was basically um to show a location of a new restaurant in a mall but it was like like um I think the caption was something like um you might be wondering where is it and with like an eye emoji like a question o love that and then the guy was like I was you know speeding up the clip as he was walking and then people watched all the way to find out where is it and some of them they go like I watched all this way and you guys like took the longest route because we literally took the longest route but anyway it was funny and uh very effective you know oh I'm so glad

28:26 that um you're you're able to to utilize what what we've taught and that you've seen results that's really cool love hearing that I love hearing any student win yeah yeah I I was happy to share that with you so about your growth like do you have any plans for obviously you talked about the um the video editing course or the ad Academy Academy yes that's coming um any other growth we are going to be launching a group coaching progr program very soon which I'm so excited for so that's been something people have wanted from us um since we launched um but as a small team of three it's definitely um hard to fulfill when you've grown a community of we're nearing 880,000 students which is crazy

29:13 so um we are going to be launching a group coaching program we brought on a new director of coaching who's going to be helping us facilitate that very excited about the group coaching program I think it's going to be great and I think there's going to be a lot of really great actionable um ongoing tips in there for our students that they'll get a lot of value out of I was just about to ask if you have any like higher touch Point programs because I'm like hm I love that the courses are like self-based and there is the community but I'm like I I just I feel like you know some people need more of that instant feedback and also you know maybe I don't know how most people are they buying courses but they never actually implement it I think for those reasons I think getting that implementation part

29:58 and just um that instant feedback is very important to have that type of support like group coaching support yeah I'm excited for it maybe eventually we'll do like more one-on-one coaching down the road like a higher ticket offering but I think for now group coaching like I just love the idea of community and being able to like not only learn from like experts um so because we'll be bringing in like guest speakers and stuff too which I'm really excited for but also to just learn from one another and to be able to like lean on other creators keep help keep each other accountable I think that's there's something really special about that so um I think the group coaching is going to be it's going to be really cool and I can't wait to see how it evolves me too I love that well uh thank you so much for coming and sharing your insights um

30:44 is there any lesson that you'd like to share with the listeners maybe one piece of advice o oh my goodness again I feel like I have so many things floating around in my head I think one piece of advice would be don't I think one big thing that's been floating around um the marketing space for years is that you need to be like posting all of this content all the time and just like huge volumes of content post three times a day this and that but if you can focus on the quality of your content rather than the quantity and like really be intentional with like the value that you're providing um and the caliber of content that you're creating I think posting just even like one to three great pieces of content a week rather than like burning yourself out trying to

31:30 post a ton of content every single day you're going to see success quicker that way because you're going to be able to um really fine-tune your craft and find those formats that are going to be a slam dunk for you and then put all your eggs in that basket and you'll your growth will just explode so that would be a big piece of advice I have thank you so much M and thanks so much for coming and sharing your insights yeah it was so much fun yeah this was great thank you so much uh how can people find you on social media I'm going to put everything in the description but you can also tell to sure sure sure so um you can follow us at one PE creative Tik Tok Instagram and then um our links to our websites are there as well so um that's the easiest place to find us yay thanks