Hey, y'all. Welcome to Stacking Growth, a Friday check-in where I take the tips we drop in the Refine Labs weekly newsletter and apply it for our own brand marketing team, stacking them up for our continued evolution and growth. I'm Saf Krenyola, and this week is focused on content. We are getting a little meta, so stick with me.
This week on Stacking Growth, called to Action, Eric Jacobson, CEO at Hatch, highlighted the benefits of a video first content strategy while also acknowledging how high the hurdle for entry can feel like when you're just getting started. That's something that I've mentioned here, as my niche helping folks get going, find their voice, all of that. So I really wanted to add my take on Eric's already immensely valuable advice with a little short form strategy. So when you're starting out with content, you don't want to invest too much time and budget until you're certain that the strategy feels right for your brand, your voice, and your goals.
I'm going to walk through the process with examples to show you how you can get this launched in only about 10 minutes or start to finish. So step one, you're going to write out a list of the top four questions you or your network are facing right now. Here's a great place for you to leverage Chat TPT. I'm prompting with what are the top 10 questions that people are asking about getting started in content creation and brand marketing right now.
I could probably put that a little better, but here we are. So 10 questions and this way I like to overshoot so that I can choose the ones that feel the most right for my voice. And these are the four questions that I'm going to focus on today. How do I choose the right platforms to focus on for my content?
What's the best way to build an audience from scratch without paid ads? How do I find my niche or unique brand voice when everything feels saturated? And how often should I post to grow consistently and does frequency matter more than quality? So after you have your list of questions, you're going to start a zoom meeting or you're just going to pick up your phone and add the front facing camera on it.
Just hold it out here. Get yourself a little desk tripod. Do anything to just get yourself on camera and on audio. Now, this step works best if you have a partner, anyone who's willing to help you out, one of your co-workers, a friend, call your mom.
I'm sure she would love to listen to your answers on P2B marketing. It just works better with a partner because the answers tend to have a more natural feel. I can say, hey, how do you grow an audience without paid ads? And then I can be like, well, I'm so happy to ask that question.
Me. So it is more helpful if you have someone else. But if you're a little nervous on camera, getting yourself started, you can do it alone. So a pro tip here is to make sure you restate the question in your answer.
This is, I think, a trouble spot with a lot of when we take our long form content and chop it down into clips. And we do this too. It's such a valuable content wheel to get clips from. But a lot of times, because it's a live event and I've asked the question, our guests will just answer it.
And so you'll get those clips without a clear starting point. You really need to work on your title and any captions or graphics to show what the question was. So if you're doing this on your own, you want to prevent any of that confusion, just restate the question in your answer. So you'll see kind of how I do that in a second.
Obviously, I'm alone, so I'm going to prompt myself with these questions. But I am sitting here pretending that you are listening and cheering me on. You're over there like, yeah, you can do it. I hope so if you're not, that's a bummer, but I guess you might go anyway.
OK, so question one is, how do I choose the right platforms to focus on for my content? So my answer, it is a little nerve-wracking. What is just me asking myself? This is why I definitely recommend a partner if you have one.
Choosing the right platform to get started for content can be really tricky. There are so many out there. You've got any meta platform, Instagram, Facebook threads, you've got TikTok, you've got LinkedIn, you've got YouTube, the most obvious choice. I would choose the platform you spend the most time on.
If you're someone who in your personal life, you scroll Instagram more than anything else, start doing Instagram reels. If you are always looking on YouTube for your answers, start with YouTube. Yes, you can post the same video across platforms. You should be tailoring them to each platform.
But if you're just getting started and you've got the content, you can kind of get it out there, see what performs, see where it's working best. And then if you see certain platforms starting to catch on, you can then start to tailor your content for those individual platforms. But really, if it's video-based, where do you spend your time? If you're on YouTube, use YouTube.
If you're on TikTok, use TikTok. Do what feels comfortable for you because this is already a big leap in confidence. So you want to give yourself the benefit of a platform you're familiar with. Whoo!
All right, next one. What's the best way to build an audience from scratch without paid ads? Building an audience from scratch without paid ads can be maybe a little overwhelming, maybe a little daunting. But the truth is that most people starting off in content don't have the budget for paid ads and they've made it work for themselves.
So you really want to focus on your keywords if you're trying to start, especially in video content. YouTube is very quickly becoming the most popular search engine, especially when B2B marketing. Take a listen to our recent episode with Eric Jacobson from Patch to learn more about that. And people are typing in, how do I dot dot dot dot dot dot?
So answer that question for them and formulate your title based on that question. This is how you dot dot dot dot boost your SEO keywords. Make sure that you've got a transcript in your video. Make sure that you're hitting those points as much as possible in your short video.
All right. How do I find my niche or unique brand voice when everything feels saturated? It can be so daunting to try and find your voice when you're just getting started, especially if you are listening to or watching a bunch of different content series and thinking that everyone is saying the same thing in the same way. I guarantee that you have a different perspective to add just because you're a different person than they are.
So how do you find your brand voice? It's kind of a fun exercise that I like to do when I'm starting things out. So find something that makes you go a little bit crazy, something that you could rant about for hours. So if I say like, hey, I actually think that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays.
Oh, I'm gonna go. A little bonkers. Find that thing for you. Record yourself, talking about it, record yourself, ranting it, get a transcript and see what natural speech patterns come out in your voice.
If you are so passionate about something that you are being truly, fully authentically yourself, own it. Use that voice. That's you at your most expressive. And then harness that for the other topics that you're going to be focusing on for your content series.
How often should I post a grow consistently and does frequency matter more than quality? You might be wondering if posting consistently is as important, more important or less important than posting quality content. And boy, I am here to say if your content is bad, don't post it. People will be so much happier for you to skip a week or a day or whatever your cadence is than having a less than good product.
Because people might listen and listen and listen and then as soon as you have like a mediocre episode, they might just write you off. They might feel your spot. The market is saturated and they're ready to go with another show that can put in your place. So instead of putting out something that you're not proud of, don't worry about your frequency as much as you are your quality.
So those are my answers. There in the zoom, zoom is going to upload them to the cloud and then I'm going to I use Adobe products. So I'm going to put this in Premiere. I'm just going to chop time stamp, chop them up.
If you're on your phone, you can chop those times stamps up a little bit easier. Any software like cat cut or anything. There are a lot of free video softwares out there too that you can just think you don't need to do any sort of editing. Just start and end.
And then you have four pieces of video content that you can post. Obviously, I will do this offline once I'm done recording this. And if you are along for this journey with me on my LinkedIn page, you'll be able to see these posts starting to trickle out over the next couple of weeks. You've got a month's worth of content here with four different answers post once a week for a month and see if your engagement improves.
If it works, you've got a replicable strategy to get you comfortable in front of the camera and also create inconsistent content before you jump into something a little bit more long term. That's all for today. As always, let me know if you're enjoying this and if you have any questions while you're out there testing, are there strategies, your strategies, any strategy you find? Let me know how it's going.
See you all next week.