You Ask, I Answer: Multiple Content Format Strategy?

In today's episode, Heidi asks, why did you start to offer video, audio, and text on your blog? Just do you track each content format differently? Um I changed in late 2017 to a video first format after seeing frankly after seeing the way the the audience, the consumer, was changing in their content consumption. People watch a ton of video year after year. Uh when I was doing uh my keynote talks, I would see the numbers on uh YouTube hours watched and Netflix hours watched continue to spiral every single year.

It's like, well, you know what? Good marketing goes where the audience is rather than tries to make the audience do what uh you want them to do. So it was time to switch to a video first format. Now, the other thing that makes video so important is that uh this framework that I created uh adapted from an idea that my old CEO Todd Defren had back in 2008. He called it content atomization to be able to take a piece of content and break it up into a bunch of little pieces.

Uh let's actually go ahead and bring up uh this piece here. This is this is the transmedia content framework. And what this simply means is you can take a piece of content and split it into uh many different formats as long as the data is there. And that's why video is so important because video contains audio by definition, uh as long as you've got a microphone. Video contains images, like you're quit literally looking at each other.

And when you use machine learning tools like uh speech to text transcription, video, at least this kind of video, contains text. Right. So if I start with this video, I can take clips of it and turn them into animations, animated gifts, and things like that. I can take smaller snippets and turn them into Instagram stories or IGTV for like the five people who watch that. Uh I can take the audio and turn this audio into a podcast episode.

In fact, I do. If you um if you would uh just subscribe to this blog feed in your um podcasting software, uh pod listening software of choice, you would be able to see the audio MP3s in every single blog post. And I take the transcript using otter AI and turn that into the blog post that accompanies this. So then the video the full video goes up on YouTube and goes up on LinkedIn. So that's the reason for doing this.

It's for the format that people prefer best. Some people want their content, they want to watch it, they wanna to you know, binge watch season twenty-five of US guys or whatever you want to call this. Um people want to listen to it, they have a commute, they hit they're working in the kitchen, they are uh at the gym, and that content works best for them there. And some people like I don't like watching video, and I just want to uh read the text, so put that out as well. By providing each content format, you're serving the audience's needs in the way that works best for them.

One of the challenges marketers have is that we tend to be very selfish in the sense of I want to do things that are best for me and my company, as opposed to uh being audience centered and saying, I'm gonna do as the best I can with the resources I have, I'm gonna try and and meet you where you are and provide content in the format that that you expect or that you want or that is most convenient for you, the audience. And so that's why I do this. Now, if you're not comfortable with the talking head video style of things, right? Uh there's a way to reverse this around. So you could this is the video first transmitted content framework, and it is the most efficient because again, video contains all these other formats within it.

You can, however, go in reverse, especially if you like really care about production quality of your videos and things like that. You would start with uh your written content, look for the content that has performed the best, uh, elevate that to audio status, right? You would uh essentially read it out loud, and either you could do it yourself, you can hire somebody to do it, you can have a machine do it, Amazon's um next generation neural network poly voices are fantastic for reading content aloud, and then from there you can elevate that one step further and and and look at what are the audio episodes that have done the best. Okay, those are the ones that great performance on text, great performance on audio. We've got to cut a uh a nice looking video for that.

If your company is an image-based company, like a video production company, uh, or you are a video star or something like that, and you we and you and you want that high-level production that that looks great, looks expensive video, um, this is the approach I would take because you can't obviously afford to or take the time to produce cinematics every single day. But if you have top your top 12 pieces of content, you can take those pieces of content, elevate them into video, and then turn that into those, you know, turn just the best pieces into video. So you can take this content framework and reverse it um to start with the text only. The downside is you will produce much less of those other formats. And finally, to Heidi's question do I track each content format differently yes so with the video by uploading it to YouTube I get YouTube's analytics on the videos whether or not you watch it on on the blog uh whether you watch it on YouTube itself I I get the data there um the audio I load to libsin the podcasting service to get downloads and uh subscrip blog subscriptions there I get blog subscriptions in general and of course Google Analytics is the single source of truth for my opera funnel at in the text that said Google Analytics is the prime source because it also tracks conversions and because I put all the content on one page right the video is here the audio is below it the text is below it I'm not terribly worried about the uh the the video being all over the place I do still monthly look at all of my content to take a look and see like are there things they're performing in an outsized way in one format that are not in other formats that is important to do.

So great question there's a lot to this might be worth doing a webinar or something on this at some point just to show the process because it's about a 40 minute process a day but you're creating video audio and and blog content every single day that is a very fast pace uh high frequency but still decent quality because we're trying to focus on you and your questions. So great question Heidi uh follow up questions leave them in the comments below subscribe to the YouTube channel to the newsletter 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.