You Ask, I Answer: Focus on One Content Marketing Format?

In today's episode, Stephanie asks, if someone only has the bandwidth to create in one format, where should they focus their time? So for content marketing purposes, the answer to this question is really easy. The answer is video. And here's why I'm gonna bring up our video first content trans transmedia content framework. One video video is the richest format.

It contains moving images, it contains still images, it contains audio, um, and from that we can turn that into many, many pieces of content. It's much harder to turn other pieces of content into video than it is to turn video into other pieces of content because it is the most dense. I mean, you know this if you've ever worked with video files, they're huge huge files. That's how they're just information dense. And so we can use video and transform it to all sorts of other stuff.

Just like I do every day with you ask I answer, um, I do the simple stuff. This video, uh, we pull the audio out, the audio becomes the podcast that goes along with that. The audio then gets sent to otter.ai, the uh transcription service, I'll link in the show notes below. Um, and you will get from that text. And suddenly, instead of just making a video every day and having to make a podcast and then having to make uh a blog post, I get three for the price of one.

Video is the center. So from video, you get you get you could take a little clips. Um those are great for Instagram stories, uh Snapchat stories if you're still doing that, uh I suppose reels if you wanted to to add some music to it and some fun stuff, uh animations, animated gifts, being able to send stuff to like Giphy if you wanted to. From the audio, like I said, you get the podcast, you can get a transcript out of it, and that transcript can be content, then you can clean it up and turn it into blog posts, ebooks, white papers, newsletters, anything like that. You could put together an entire set of transcripts as a book, uh, effectively.

Um so if you're doing a video show every day, every week, you could be writing your next book. From the video, you can also take still images, right? Screen captures. Those become things like Instagram content. You can put them up on you know Flickr, 500 pixels, uh Pixiv, all these different image sharing sites if you're depending on the industry you're in.

And of course the video itself, the the native video you can load that to uh YouTube, obviously is the the number one choice because of it's functionally just a giant search engine. Um LinkedIn, if you're in the B2B side you should be loading your videos natively to LinkedIn, uh Facebook, uh Twitter if uh depending on the length you can load your videos into uh systems like Webinar Ninja or go to uh go to webinar or any of this any service that supports pre-recorded videos and then depending on the type of videos you have you could put together an entire webinar. But even if you didn't just by having those videos on on say YouTube you can then go into your YouTube analytics look at them and say okay which of my you know 250 videos I do a year um which are the top ten what the top ten topics are just getting the views getting the views over time like consistently racking up views guess what that tells you it's time to do a webinar on those things or it's time to do uh a uh something virtual or a live stream or something like that um but whatever it is that helps you understand you know this is a a topic that is hot and that that can webinar if if the webinar does well it can become a conference talk. There's not much of a difference these days because, you know, pandemic. Um but for events like content marketing world for example, you might want to to look at your video catalog and say, huh, what's done really well?

What's done so well that I could turn this into a session that people would actually want to see. And if the idea continues to grow and grow and grow, uh that could become a keynote. So video encapsulates so much of this information um and does it so well that I can't think of a better format for a marketer to to really focus on. If you only have the bandwidth to create in one format, create video because you're creating in multiple formats by default. Especially if you do it um you don't overproduce it, right?

So you ask I answer yes I've got a decent microphone, got a decent camera but there's other than the question uh text and a few notes there's not a whole lot that goes into these. It's not like some long elaborate script. Um it literally is just answering questions and uh it's not overproduced. Once I'm done with this video, uh it goes into Camtasia, Camtasia renders it and right up to YouTube. So it's not like it takes hours and hours every day.

The whole process of this process for me every morning takes about 40 minutes from beginning to end. Some mornings a little longer than others depending on on on how tired I am but you can be doing the same thing. You can borrow I mean the idea of you ask an answer comes from Marcus Sheridan from his book, They Ask You Answer. And you can do the same thing for your industry or the same thing for you for all the questions that people are asking you. Go into your customer service inbox.

Go to your social media channels, start pulling out and restoring every single question that that comes in and answer them. You don't necessarily have to tile it as you know on the nose as you ask I answer. Um but you absolutely can just spend time answering people's questions. Uh doing it either by yourself or with uh you know partners or customers, but just do lots and lots of video. Another thing you can do is uh for video if you want to create a lot of it, um, but you don't necessarily want to do it as a regular process every day, is do subject matter expert interviews inside your company, outside your company.

If you can grab 45 minutes of questions that you have that to for an expert, you ask them those their questions, then you take that video, slice it up, you know, maybe in five minute chunks, right? Uh, and that's going to give you nine videos. Uh, that's a lot of content. If they it could be nine weeks if you want to do a weekly series, it could be do to nine nine days, almost almost two weeks, uh, two business uh two business weeks of content for weekdays. But then again, take that video and splice into all these different pieces, and instead of creating one piece of content or one social poster, you're gonna create a tremendous amount of assets from one core asset.

So if you've only got time to focus on a format, do it with video. You don't have to spend a lot of money. Um this device, uh, if your phone is you know less than two years old, the the the likelihood that the camera on it is good enough to do high quality video is pretty good. Uh more importantly, you'll probably need to do get something for better audio because the the audio on these is just terrible. Uh, but this is a good enough camera.

Even if you it's a little bit more work. If you don't have uh video editing software, you should get some. There's there are uh a number of uh free open source packages as well as the paid ones out there. OpenShot, I believe, or open cut, or shot cut is one. Um so there are some really good free tools that you can use, and there's obviously even what your computer comes with, you know, Windows Movie Maker, I think that still exists.

iMovie on the Mac, uh, they're good enough to generate decent quality video because you're not going to be doing fancy effects and Hollywood stuff. You know, it's it's just a lot of times just a talking head. You have a maybe some title to a title screen of some kind and that's it. It doesn't have to be super fancy. Unless you work for a video production company, in which case you should be using your company's full capabilities to demonstrate um just how polished and professional you are.

But anybody in any department can be uh creating video. If you don't have a good camera and uh your phone's far away as it should be for a decent shot you may want to have a little pocket recorder that um can sit in your pocket or have a super super inexpensive you know nine dollar lavalier mic that can record you talking and then you sync up the audio and video later in production. Really good idea to do that with subject matter experts because you want them to sound good. You want them to look good and sound good when you turn your video into other formats. So focus on video and it will make all the other content for you.

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