Do Something With Your Marketing: Test Your Gear

In this week's Do Something with Your Marketing, I want you to test your gear. What do I mean by this? Not just making sure that your gear works, but know what all the gear you have, what it does and doesn't do. This is especially true if you're a creator. If you're a podcaster, a blogger, uh a video uh maker, whatever the thing is.

If you're a physical maker, know what your gear is and does and all those things. Because what happens is as creators, we very often just let stuff kind of pile up without running comparative tests, without knowing this is what this gear does in comparison to other gear that we have. So not generically uh with all the world, but with our own stuff. So, for example, I have uh I have three uh addictions. I use that word very lightly here, uh somewhat frivolously.

I have three things that I have a tendency to collect. I collect keyboards, uh headphones, and microphones. And so I just have stuff laying around, right? One of the things I've been doing recently is testing this stuff to see which situations a given piece of gear is good for, what it's good for and what it's not. I'll give you a couple of examples.

So these are noise canceling headphones from um a local brand. Uh they're they're really, really, really good at active noise cancellation. Their audio quality as a microphone, not so great, right? So if you had to do a conference call, these are fine. Uh if you have to do like professional video using a uh a more professional mic, these are not fine.

Uh, another example. Uh these are uh these are uh essentially aircraft headphones, right? Bluetooth aircraft headphones. You have a nice little boom here. Um amazing noise cancellation, like these will suppress uh stuff passively, and it's really nice because they're passive noise cancellation, which means there's you don't they don't have to be on to be working.

They're they're engineered for helicopters and aircraft. The sound quality of this microphone here, you may as well just dial in to wherever you're calling from because the the sound quality is awful. Um have some bone conductance headphones here. These uh attach to your head and transmit sound through your bones. Audio quality is not great unless you put in earplugs.

So if you want again, something that will quiet things down, this combined with uh earplugs are great. Haven't tested the microphone on these yet to see how that they sound. These are uh custom made uh by John Wall, my marketing offer coffee co-host. They're uh he calls them Johnny's, they're Sony MDR 7506s that have been modified to take a boom microphone. So the boom microphone just attaches right into the headphones.

Um these not great noise cancellation, not great noise suppression, but the microphones sounds terrific because it's a wired microphone. So lots of different gear. What are the situations each of these are appropriate for? Some things like these uh these are really good for noisy places, like you could wear these to a construction site. You wouldn't necessarily want to fly with them on an airplane because they're not super portable and they're super super heavy.

Um the newest toss-up for me is gonna be figuring out which is better. Either active noise cancellation, which is electronic in nature, requires you to keep the batteries charged, or using bone conductance with headphones to figure out which sounds better to listen to material to listen to content, and then of course to test these out to see how they sound when recording video. All this is important because I need to know what gear to pack and when for which kind of situation. Am I doing am I gonna be on the road? It let's just say magically these things have fantastic microphones.

I don't know if they do or not. I I would guess not. Um but let's just say they did. Could I then not pack another piece of gear for creating video if I could bring this along? Uh the other thing you could do is you could have specialized gear for uh certain uh applications.

So there this is the microphone collection. So now there are all these different microphones in here. Are there certain microphones that are better than others? Absolutely. A lava microphone is great if you want to um to be able to attach it to a device that you're wearing.

A head worn mic is good um but has a wireless component that can susceptible to interference and has to be recharged. The lava does not need to be recharged. Um there's uh separate audio devices like shotgun microphones. You need to know the capabilities of your gear. And by the way, we're not just talking audio video, even something as simple as uh a markdown editor versus a Microsoft Word style uh text editor versus a plain text editor.

If you're a blogger, you may have different applications based on the type of writing that you're doing. Uh, but knowing the capabilities of each and what you can do can really expand your capabilities. For example, I started writing my email newsletter and my blog post in Markdown a few years ago, which is a uh a scripting markup language. It's like lightweight uh formatting, but there are so many tools that can be used on Markdown to convert it into other things, such as PDFs, such as HTML for web pages, such as um uh actual code for documentation that it's a very versatile language. So, no matter what kind of creating uh you're doing, whatever content marketing, if you will, you're doing, know what your tools do, know which tools best for which situation, and use those tools appropriately, but make sure that from time to time you're testing them out.

Is there something new? Is there something better? Is there something that you can uh take advantage of that will yield better results for you than what you're currently using? Always be on the lookout. Not not every day, but maybe once a quarter.

Look around the landscape and go, huh. I wonder if there are any new apps for travel, any new apps for writing, for music composition, for video editing. You might be surprised at just uh how how much of a difference a single tool upgrade can make if you're already proficient at something and you just need a few tweaks to your workflow. So that's what I want you to do this week for the uh do something with your marketing. Whatever gear you have, test it out, make sure it works, uh, and then compare it to other types of gear you have in that category to see is this the best choice for the type of marketing content and creation that I'm doing.

Uh as always, please leave your comments below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.