09 Feb How To Gain Content Marketing Efficiencies
Creating great content takes work and like it or not, there isn’t much you can do to change that. When done well, your content marketing efforts should be engaging, effective and entertaining. It must break through the clutter of your audience’s digital world, cause them to pause, consume AND (if they’re still with you) take the action you’d like them to take. Sounds like a lot? It can be.
Don’t fret! Just because great content takes effort, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be spending hours pouring into each perfect GIF. We have a simple approach to planning your content that will help your efforts go further than they have before. With a slight tweak to how you capture moments, you could breathe new life into your content mix and reach your target audience in the way that they like to be talked to, no matter who they are. The best part is, you can do it within one shoot.
Say Hello To Your Best Friend, Video
Stay with me. I know that video may seem like the LEAST efficient way to create content. After all, you need to secure the right equipment, write the script, bring in the right talent and then take it into the editing bay. With a little planning, this video can live a new life in multiple ways. It’s easy to think of a video as a singular piece of content. Many times, you have very specific goals that you’re trying to achieve. If you take a step back, however, your next video project should be able to have many iterations that are just as strong and achieve different goals than the original video itself.
I like to think of these videos much like a blog post or article. They hold the most information and are there for the people who want to take a deep dive into a topic you’ve introduced them to. This long form content is not right for each consumer. Some are interested in a quote, a GIF or a photo that portrays a sound bite or visually engaging tidbit. Those people can be served just as easily with content you’ve already shot.
Let’s use an example from the leaders (for better or worse) in content marketing, Buzzfeed.
They took an interview with the cast of the FOX television show Brooklyn 99 and broke it apart into (at least) 15 pieces of content. Here is the full video of their Q&A session:
Video Becomes: Short Videos
This is probably the easiest one. In the age of Vine, Instagram videos and diminishing attention spans, videos that are six, fifteen or thirty seconds can be the perfect entry point for a longer form video. In some cases, it may even be the only type of content they want to consume. If you shift your thinking to which parts of your video is most relevant to the different target demographics you’re trying to reach, you’ll be able to easily identify where your short form edits should come from.
Video Becomes: GIFs
For some, GIFs are confounding. How are they made? How do you even pronounce the word? Worry not, as the GIF has become the best friend of content marketers over the past few years. They’re short, they convey a bite-size amount of information, they’re more eye-catching than photos and social networks have continued to adapt their platforms to allow for their posting in all iterations. Many messaging apps even have GIF keyboards built directly into their interface.
The dirtiest secret about GIFs is that they are easy to make (and getting easier). If you have a series of photos, a video file or even a YouTube link, you can create a GIF easily and effectively. There are even many websites that will do the hard work for you.
Here are a few examples:
- GIFs from Images: http://gifmaker.me/
- GIFs from Videos: http://makeagif.com/video-to-gif
- GIFs from YouTube Video: http://makeagif.com/youtube-to-gif
- Resizing/Optimizing Your GIF: http://ezgif.com/
From our video example above, you’ll see that they took individual answers, jokes and high points of the interview and transformed them into truly engaging and shareable GIFs:
Video Becomes: Images
Again, in retrospect, this may seem like an easy one but it takes a little planning to get the most out of this one too. Photos and images can be captured in mainly two ways but used in many different iterations. The first way to capture images is to have a second shooter on the day of your video shoot to capture behind the scenes content. This look at “how the sausage is made” lets your audience feel like they’re on the inside and have special access to the content.
Here’s an example of a behind the scenes photo from the Brooklyn 99 video:
The other way to gain images from a video is to use screenshots from your video file. These can be used in any of the ways you’d use photos on your social networks: images, text overlays, step by step builds, etc.
As you can see, starting with a larger scale piece of content and a little bit of forward thinking in your planning can turn one shoot into dozens of iterations for your social channels. If you use your time effectively, your content calendar can be filled with many fresh looks for your audience and ultimately more impressions for your featured content.
How do you find efficiencies in your content creation? Let us know below!
