We all know that social media is a great content distribution tool. It's a great way to get your content into the hands of your audience. But the first question you've got to ask yourself is where is your audience hanging out?
Chances are if they're consumers, they're hanging out on Facebook. If they're business people, they're probably hanging out on LinkedIn. If they're here for fashion, fun, and that kind of stuff, that's Instagram. And news and quick hits are usually Twitter.
Each one of these platforms uses slightly different ways to distribute media, whether it's graphics or video or audio, whatever it is. Today I want to give you some tips about how to use audio and video in your marketing. I'm going to give you five different ways to do this.
Flash Briefing
The first one is Alexa. You can use any Amazon device to distribute content — it could be the new video ones, it could be just the little Dots or the Echos. There's a feature on Amazon devices called the Flash Brief and the way it works is you get up in the morning, you say, “Hey Alexa, play my Flash Brief.”
So, what's the Flash Brief? Well, it's usually a sequence of different information that you want to get to start your morning. One of the things you may want to do is have a daily devotional or a motivational minute. Or maybe you want to know the weather or you want the news. Well, you can sequence those.
Something that you can do as a marketer is create a minute flash brief. That's the recommended timeframe: just a minute or less to give a quick tip every single day.
If you're in the coaching business, speaking business, something along those lines, flash briefs are a great way to get your content out there. If you want to learn more about it, the next episode I'm doing, which is number 425, will have an interview with a guy called “The Alexa Guy” and he talks about how to put together a flash brief. It's not exactly technologically easy, but coming up with the content should be so you can definitely get it done.
I've got one. If you want to check it out, go to baconflash.com. There you will find a video, and it will show you how to add content to your morning flash brief on your iPhone. I'm pretty sure they have it on any of the Google devices or Android devices as well, but through the Alexa app you can easily sequence and add content. You can add the Bacon System sales and marketing minute to your flash brief every single morning and get some great content.
Podcast
The second way that you can do that is you could take that flash brief and you can turn it into a podcast. You don't have to create a brand new podcast. You can use that podcast and feed it into Apple. Now you can have it on Alexa devices, and you could have it as a motivational minute on a podcast every single day. I know a lot of people that do those and they're very successful. So there's a simple way to take one piece of content and share it across multiple platforms.
Social Video
Okay, now let's get moving! And by moving, I mean video. Think about maybe doing the exact same thing — if you don't want to get into the Alexa side of things, you can it as a video. Now, almost every laptop has a camera built into it, so you could do it live with your face. You could say, “Hey, it's Brian and here's today's marketing minute.” You can take that video and then share it across multiple social media platforms.
Obviously you're going to need some kind of video hosting for that. You could put it up on YouTube, which is free, but if you're going to do something like this, I strongly suggest you get a paid for service. The one I recommend is called Vimeo. The cool thing about Vimeo is that you can set it up to automatically post to your social media once it's been uploaded. So you can have it post to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter — all from that one feed.
Now keep in mind that Instagram like squares video, whereas Facebook will allow you to do wide video. Yo you have to experiment a little bit and make sure that the formats you're using will work well across all of those media platforms.
Animoto
The next thing I want to talk about is when you want to produce something a little bit slicker, and for that I would recommend using a tool called Animoto. Animoto is a prepackaged kind of video production. If you want to find out more about it, go to brianloves.info/animato.
This tool comes with pre-made templates, so all you have to do is drop in the video, change the text, and you can create short one-minute videos for marketing, sales concepts, and maybe even for webinars that you're doing. Whatever it is that you want to create, these are great little tools. It's not super expensive either for a year.
The cool thing about it is that it comes with a ton of stock photos and stock videos, so you don't even have to create anything. You don't have to get in front of a camera, you don't have to buy additional stuff. It's got video content and pictures built into it from Getty Images. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Now, you can't take those outside of Animoto. But still, having all of that content at your fingertips, having all of those pre-built templates, this tool makes it super easy to create great video. Once you create one, you can duplicate it, so if you want to make multiple versions — for example, you want to make a wide version and a square version — you can easily do that. It makes it super simple and it will share to all of your social media right from that platform. This is another quick way, simple way for you to create some great video content.
Graphics Slideshow
The last thing I want to talk about is something I know how to do on a Mac. I'm sure it's doable on other platforms and I've seen it on PCs, but if you have a Mac, you have your Mac Photos app. Think about using Mac Photos to import a bunch of photos that you've created in a third-party tool. Let's say you have something like Word Swag. I would also recommend Canva, which is free. You can go in, grab stock photos from say Pixabay, add some text on top of it and create still images. Then you'd bring those photos into your Mac Photos app.
From there, you can create a slideshow and then export it as a video. So now you're taking basically stock stills and sequencing them, and maybe you can add some music. It has built-in music if you want to use theirs. I don't recommend you use copywritten music, because a lot of social media platforms will take that down. You can use a Beatles song or a Who song or whatever. You can use stock music, but there are also free stock music libraries out there as well. You just have to search for them on Google.
Final Thoughts
So with all that being said, here are the five things again.
First, create a flash brief, have it on your Alexa every single morning, and easily let your people know your marketing minute, your sales tip, whatever it is. Number two, turn that Alexa brief into a podcast. Have it up on Apple devices, SoundCloud, wherever you want to put it. Number three, create some video, a video minute of you speaking into the camera. Number four, use something like Animoto to create cool marketing graphics. Number five is use Mac Photos to create a slideshow from still images.
Using some of these simple tips for your business will boost your marketing presence online.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/
