Miles, what is your guilty pleasure snack? That would have to be the Costco, Smores clusters. I had to stop buying them because they were unbelievably so bad for you, but I would just crush a whole bag. So look them up, Kirkland, Smores clusters, highly recommend best snack out there.
Welcome back to Stacking Grot Snacks. I'm Steph Creniola and I'm here with Miles Campbell, brand development manager at Refine Labs to talk about content and video strategy. All right, Miles, I've recorded my podcast, I've recorded the video, I've done everything that I need to do. Now what?
How do I take this and bring it out? How do I distribute? How do I edit? How do I get it to the people who I want to see it?
That is a great question and a fun little process. I would highly suggest organizing all of your files first. I know you might have one big recording or you might have five recordings, Dropbox, Google Drive, whatever you want to do, get organized, nice files and then you want to figure out a file naming process first, right? So you want everything, you usually go by recording date, name of the recording, and that way when you ship it off to your editor or you're editing yourself, you know how this is recorded then, I'll do this one first.
So file organization is huge, getting all the files in one place and of course those files might be really big. So sometimes if you're recording a DSLR like us, we might need to process it first, get it from that giant.mov file that it records in, break it down into much more manageable MP4s, brings a 30 gig file size down to three or four, much more easy to pass it off, send a link to download, upload, then you're going to want to get with your editor and figure out for yourself what you're going to use to do. So we're in Adobe Shop, we love Premiere here, I think that has everything you need, especially when it can talk to Photoshop or after effects very well, you can drag and drop different projects from different programs. So we're going to do the final cut, there's DaVinci for a little bit more high-end cinematic stuff, so then figuring out your software and what you're going to use.
So if I have never used Adobe before, I'm hiring an editor, I'm putting this squarely on someone else's shoulders, I need to make sure my files are organized, that I've got a good naming convention, so they know what files to use, we have good solid communication. How do I communicate what I want from the edit? Do I have to give them timestamps of things I want cut out? Do editors usually use their best judgment?
How do I have that conversation with an editor? I think you should give the editor as much information as possible. A lot of the times now, people see it linked in videos, and so they'll just ship off the whole hour recording and say, make this, that's fine and all, but especially if you're not working day-to-day with that editor, if you're just hiring a freelance, that's really hard for them to go from ground zero to fully finished product. So I'll give them as much information as possible, timestamps of what you want, titles of the clips, what to cut out, what do you want to lower third, do you want the title animation, do you need certain brand colors, brand imagery, so I'd add all of that into a nice little document, more of like a proposal almost.
Okay, here's the intro, here's what we want, here's how many we want, as much information as possible for the editors, there's less back and forth because they're going to send you something that you don't even like, you don't want, you have to do a full revision, then they're not going to be able to get back to you for another week, they're working on other stuff, and also it's dragged out two weeks, you're recording this a month ago, you don't have any clips yet, so figuring knowing what you want beforehand is the most important part because the editor doesn't know what you want, so just kind of don't unload that onto them without giving them clear and final steps. And if you are doing it yourself, what are some basic tips if someone's a beginner for video editing and they really just want like cut clips, how do you recommend they get started, some things on the back end that you can help them with? Editing software can be really intimidating, especially if you haven't used it. So I've learned so much over the last five years from YouTube, I pick up a new step every week, whether it's hotkeys, really important, every single letter on your keyboard is going to be tied to a command in the editing software, so you can get really fast if you just start learning the hotkeys.
Small little things that are going to improve your process and speed up the process as well, and then once you've learned it once, you don't have to learn it again, then you've got all these tools and your tool belt, so go to YouTube, anyone can be, I don't want to say this, but anyone can be an editor. And I totally recommend, again, starting with Adobe, you can get courses online, there's a lot of good LinkedIn groups you can join for editing and you can ask questions, why does this look weird, why did this happen, and getting this error. You basically figure out a lot to help with people on the internet. Yeah, I really don't want to discount that.
And the fact that even experts are doing that should hopefully help inspire people to start to try on their own. The number of times I mean, I've been editing audio for over 20 years at this point, and still I, how do I XYZ in Adobe Audition, or if I'm trying to learn something new and premiere, how do I in Adobe Premiere? And the internet knows you don't have to be an expert in all of those commands and all of those processes because you have the resources to help you out online. And there are so many videos and so many tutorials that will help you get to where you need to be.
It's a really good piece of advice. Everything's edited. You've got your video, you've got your video clips, you've got your podcast. Let's talk about distribution for a few minutes.
So what do you recommend for a distribution strategy that helps achieve the goals that we talked about all the way in part one? How do you stay consistent with releases? How do you reach your audience? How do we get it out there?
It's not a bad idea to use as many channels as you possibly can. I know that might be tough with bandwidth, with a small team, getting everything edited, everything prepared, getting copywritten for posts, but I don't think there's not too many places you can put your content. You want your content out everywhere. So I would start big and then you can narrow down based on results, right?
Post on LinkedIn, post on Facebook, post, make a TikTok for your company, make a YouTube account, throw everything out there, and you can see, wow, TikTok, this last video got 100 likes. We've got a ton of comments. Let's focus there. YouTube's not really working right now.
Let's keep posting there. But maybe we don't focus there for the next month because we're getting so much love on TikTok. Figure it out. Put it out there.
If you just start on one channel and it's not working and then you have to start over on another channel, you're just wasting time and momentum. So I would highly suggest take as many channels where your audience is, put it all out there, and then you can refine your strategy from there. Okay, Miles, thank you so much for all of this info. I hope that everyone is inspired to go out and start making content.
If they have any questions, where can they find and follow your work? Yeah, they can hop on over to LinkedIn, find me on there. Miles Campbell, you can follow the Refine Labs YouTube channel. Please do go subscribe or follow the Stackin' Growth podcast on wherever you listen to your podcast.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Miles. Thank you everyone for watching and we'll see you all next time. Thanks, Seth.