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

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

Stephanie asks, “If someone only has the bandwidth to create in one format, where should they focus their time?”

Video. Why? Because a transmedia content strategy permits you to spin lots of assets from one video.

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

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Machine-Generated Transcript

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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.

Here’s why I bring up our video first content tramp transmedia content framework.

One video video is the richest format.

It contains moving images, it contains still images, it contains audio.

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’s the most dense.

I mean, you know this, if you’ve ever worked with video files, they’re huge, huge files, that 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 I do the simple stuff this video, we pull the audio out the audio becomes the podcast that goes along with that the audio then gets sent to otter.ai that transcription services, I’ll link in the show notes below.

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 a blog post, I get three for the price of one video is the center.

So from video you get you get you take little clips.

And those are great for Instagram stories, Snapchat stories if you’re still doing that, I suppose reels if you wanted to add some music to it and some fun stuff, animations animated GIFs being able to send stuff to like giffy if you wanted to, from the audio, like I said, you get the podcast, 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 effectively.

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 Flickr 500 pixels pixiv, all these different image sharing sites if you’re depending on the industry you’re in.

And of course, the video itself, the native video, you can load that to YouTube, obviously, is the number one choice because of it.

Functionally, just a giant search engine, LinkedIn, if you’re in the b2b side, you should be loading your videos natively to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, depending on the length.

You can load your videos into systems like webinar Ninja, or go to 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 a YouTube Analytics, look at them.

It’s okay, which of my 250 videos I do a year? Which of the top 10 what the top 10 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.

So it’s time to do a something virtual there a live stream or something like that.

But whatever it is, that helps you understand, you know, this is a topic that is hot, and that that can webinar.

If the webinar does well, it can become a conference talk.

There’s not much of a difference these days because, you know, pandemic.

But for events like content marketing world, for example, you might want to, to look at your video catalog and say, Hmm, 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, that could become a keynote.

So video encapsulates so much of this information and does so well that I can’t think of a better format for a marketer to really focus on if you only have the bandwidth to create one format.

Create video because you’re creating multiple formats by default, especially if you do it.

You don’t over produce it.

Right? So you asked to answer yes, we’ve got a decent microphone got a decent camera.

But there’s other than the question, text and a few notes.

There’s not a whole lot that goes into these.

It’s not like some long, elaborate script.

It literally is just answering questions and it’s not over produced.

Once I’m done with this video.

It goes into Camtasia Camtasia renders it and read 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, right? You can borrow.

I mean, the idea of us can 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 comes in and answer them.

You don’t necessarily have to tile it as you know, on the nose as you asked to answer.

But you absolutely can just spend time answering people’s questions, doing it either by yourself or with partners or customers.

But just do lots and lots of video.

Another thing you can do is video if you want to create a lot of it.

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 for an expert, you ask them the questions then you take that video, slice it up, you know, maybe in five minute chunks, right? That’s going to give you nine videos.

That’s a lot of content.

They could be nine weeks if you want to do a weekly series could be due to nine, nine days, so almost almost two weeks to business to 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 going to create a tremendous amount of assets from one core asset.

So if you only got time to focus on a format, do a video.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money this device if your phone is you know less than two years old, the likelihood that the camera on is good enough to do high quality video is pretty good.

More importantly, you’ll probably need to get something for better audio because the audio on the is just terrible.

But this is a good enough camera.

Even if you it’s a little bit more work if you don’t have video editing software, you should get some there’s there are a number of free open source package.

As well as the paid ones out there.

Open shot I believe are open cut, shot cut as one.

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, they’re good enough to generate decent quality video because you’re not gonna 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 a company’s full capabilities to demonstrate just how polished and professional you are, but anybody in any department can be creating video.

If you don’t have a good camera and your phone as far away as it should be for a decent shot.

You may want to have a little pocket recorder that can sit in your pocket or have a superstar super inexpensive, you know $9 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 then we’ll make all the other content for you got follow up questions leave in the comments box below.

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