Inspiring Conversations with Daniel Pitts of Blume Video Marketing

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Pitts.

Hi Daniel, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in a small town in Texas, in a family that strongly prioritized volunteering and serving in the community that we were planted in with the skills and talents that we developed.

When I was very young, around 6 or 7 years old, I began my journey of visual storytelling and creating videos. Using PowerPoint, some clip art, and my imagination, I would piece together a short “movie” with animated characters following a simple storyline. From this time on, I was always a person who loved to craft and dream up visuals that were backed by powerful stories.

In high school and college, I continued perfecting my craft by producing video content for small non-profits and slowly working into simply creating better and more polished videos for the clients that I worked with. Through this time, I also began to pursue a dual major in both Marketing and Youth Ministry, building professional skills that I use to this day in my businesses.

When it comes to learning video production, I never went to a formal school for filmmaking, instead in leaned into my passion for it and learned the multitude of skills that are involved through both experience and the relationships that I grew with other filmmakers in Kansas City and the surround area.

Over the last couple of years, I have built a wedding videography business, “Daniel Pitts Films,” in the Kansas City area, working with countless couples to tell their unique stories through a Cinematic-Documentary style. I took this business from a “side gig” to supporting me full-time and propelling me into a fully freelance videography career.

Last year, in 2023, my wife and I started an entirely new business called Blume Video Marketing. Our agency’s mission is to make high-quality video marketing and production accessible to small businesses and non-profits in our region. Our goal with this business is to close the gap between the large and well-funded big businesses and the small businesses in our community through a creative and focused business model and our personal experience working with non-profits and small businesses.

Growing up, my wife’s dad was a small business owner, and as I mentioned, I worked with a lot of non-profits, because of this we both personally and strongly believe that the work we do is 100% important. While most video production companies go after the biggest clients they can get, we only care about helping those passed overgrow by reaching their audience with effective videos.

A video detailing my wife’s and I’s story at Blume: https://vimeo.com/922140286?share=copy. An overview video for who we are at Blume: https://vimeo.com/923804262?share=copy.

Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I would say that no part of this journey has been entirely smooth, in fact, with much of what we are doing we are swimming upstream. However, I believe that the businesses swimming upstream and disrupting the market have the biggest impact on the lives of the clients you serve and will, in the end, succeed most.

One challenge I faced in the beginning was how to create a brand that felt fresh and matched a business model that would serve non-profits and small businesses. I knew I wanted to work with that audience, but I had to develop exactly how to do it. My wife and I spent around three months on this question and how it worked into our brand identity. While there are many videographers and video production companies in KC, we didn’t want to be just some more video guys but to make something truly disruptive to the market.

We had to make a couple of hard decisions when it came to developing and putting this business model in gear, such as choosing to stay a virtual business instead of owning a studio or having a physical storefront. Because our goal is to serve organizations and businesses with smaller budgets, by cutting our overhead, we are able to make the actual video product more accessible. We also have chosen to work using our own skills on smaller projects, and hiring contractors for special projects, again to keep overhead as low as possible. Through making many decisions like this, we have built our business from the ground up to give the highest return on investment to our clients without wasting any of their money on unnecessary spending.

Another struggle that we found was simply finding people and creating awareness for our new business. While the small business and nonprofit market is quite large in KC, most leaders and decision-makers choose who they work with based on referrals and who they know personally instead of trusting digital marketing and advertising streams to find new people. So, in a sense, we have been moving more towards traditional business outreach by simply building relationships with leaders in the area and being the first to give back to the community without expecting anything in return.

We have made it an important part of our philosophy to give educational content on social media, teach tips on short-form video content and how to grow on social media, and even take time to build guides on how to “DIY” your videos (https://www.blumevideo.com/free-guide) for those on a strict budget.

While some of this may seem counter-intuitive to selling our video services, we believe giving establishes a genuine relationship with businesses so that when they are looking to reach more clients in the future, they will work with us versus comparable production companies without this level of relationship. So far, this philosophy has worked for us, finding clients and connections we could have never found if we solely spent time with impersonal digital marketing methods.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next, you can tell us a bit more about your business.
If I asked you to point out an organization or business with bad media/videos/socials, most likely, you are going to immediately think of a local business that seems to be years behind its larger competitors. In a world where “91% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service” and “89% of consumers want to see more videos from brands in 2024”, that is a huge problem that keeps growing larger (Source: https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/).

So why is this a problem? I believe that it comes down to a couple of factors: time, resources, education, and reputation. Each of these factors has created a gap between big business and small business (SMBs) that continues to widen the longer it is not addressed. SMBs are generally pressed to find time for day to day operations due to understaffing, so simply thinking about having to come up with a video idea to send a production company is out of the question.

They also don’t always have the resources for expensive commercials or large traditional production crews. In the same way, they don’t have time to learn how to create good videos for themselves or don’t know where to start with outsourcing the production. And finally, the gap continues to widen because there isn’t a digital reputation out there for people to find. Customers may not know what to expect when they shop there or how reputable they are.

When creating Blume Video Marketing, this is the exact problem we desire to address for small businesses and non-profits. Our goal is to create an effective video that takes a limited amount of time and resources from our clients while bringing expertise to the table from working with organizations like theirs and adding value through education all along the journey we take with them.

We specialize in creating effective videos that have a strong ROI for the “small guys.” We create primarily testimonials, branding, promo, social media, and advertising videos. Each of our services we offer at an affordable price by keeping our business overhead low and other costs to the customer down as well.

We also plan to roll out outcome-based pricing later this year within our business model to make video even more accessible. This means that instead of paying an upfront fee for a video and the client assumes the risk for whether that video does well or not, the cost of the video is based on the business (or donations in the case of non-profits) that it brings in, along with regular KPIs (key performance indicators) such as views, watch time, engagement, etc.

This idea is focused on eliminating any upfront cost and simply bringing sales or organizational growth to those we work with and sharing that business success with them through their video marketing campaigns. While this model is still in development, we are excited to make video marketing even more accessible and valuable to businesses throughout Kansas City.

At the heart of Blume are three core values: sparking growth, accessible quality, and sharing success. We want to help be that spark for SMBs and non-profits by helping them reach their audience more effectively through video. We want to make this growth accessible to all in order to help close the gap between big and small businesses and nonprofits. And finally, we only want to succeed ourselves when our clients win as well.

I would say that I am most proud of our work and who we work with. I believe that the videos that we create for non-profits and small businesses are truly of incredible quality considering the budget they are typically made at. I have seen the content that we make not just look good but also tell authentic stories that bring tears to live audiences, succinctly advocate for underserved people groups, and help effect true change in the KC area.

I am proud that instead of helping the Nike and Walmart of the world get another dollar, our video marketing work helps change lives by reaching people who could otherwise not be reached effectively. By coming alongside non-profits and small businesses as a partner (versus a vendor), we are, in effect, an extension of their local mission.

What are your plans for the future?
As Blume is a fairly new business, I have a lot of plans for the future for how we can truly serve our community in Kansas City and effect change.

Every one of our plans focuses on closing the gap between the big and small guy in Kansas City by helping them get heard in their market with their audience. This mission breaks down the four primary channels: saving leaders & marketers time, making video marketing less resource-demanding, providing free marketing education via our socials and blogs, and helping build the reputations through compelling videos of SMBs and non-profits in the Kansas City area.

In these pursuits, here are a couple of specifics I am excited to be working on in the coming year:

1. Connect with even more small business and non-profit leaders to add value and learn through those relationships.

2. Streamline our production processes to save us time and thus costs to our clients. I am hoping to incorporate AI tools in our workflow to assist human creativity but not replace the true creativity that only people can do.

3. Consistently produce educational content on social media and our website that keeps small business and non-profit leaders up to date on how to effectively incorporate video in their growth strategy.

4. Roll out an outcome-based video pricing model for our clients. I want to even further make good videos accessible to our clients. Just like with Google ads, you pay for each actual result (impressions, clicks, conversions, etc.). Our clients would be able to pay only for real business results. The goal would be to mitigate any risk involved with video marketing so that you only pay out of the sales you make.

In the end, we want small businesses and nonprofits to thrive through effective and compelling video, and I can’t wait to continue to focus on just that in the coming years through Blume Video Marketing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.blumevideo.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blumevideo/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blumevideomarketing
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blumevideo
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmfxGI2RenrkGg91z5rNT1w
• Other: https://vimeo.com/blumevideo